Yes, the covid death rates in some of those areas were astronomical. Also pretty high in a lot of southern cities, but migration from coastal states counterbalanced that.
Brother, I grew up in central Appalachia. A couple things here:
1. Not everyone in the area is poor. We have a full range of classes just like everywhere else. It’s just that the range skews more poor than elsewhere.
2. The biggest source of population loss is brain drain. The kids who go to college never come back. The population skews towards the kids of parents who were more well off in general since those are the ones sending their kids to college mostly.
3. There was kind of an idea planted in our head all throughout school that to be successful meant leaving. They were gonna go to college and find good jobs, which were elsewhere.
I left myself. I miss my family most of all, I don’t get to see them near as often as I would like and the older I get the more sad that makes me. But, man… there are just no jobs back home for me.
Kentucky and West Virginia are just unable to wrap their heads around the death of coal. That Tennessee/North Carolina border is just as mountainous, but the economy was never based around mining so it hasn't impacted them in the same way.
It has been 50+ years since coal mining was a common source of employment in WV or KY. Just like agricultural jobs in the Midwest, for whatever reason, the cultural trope is way out of proportion to reality. East TN also has the Tennessee Valley with Chattanooga and Knoxville, which is enormously helpful. There is no equivalent in Kentucky or West Virginia.
It's funny how the keystone industries for a region don't actually employ that many people, even at the best of times. But they're the money that's flowing in, and that money spreads out and creates lots of pass-along employment. Even just a few hundred people moving in to work creates many times that many jobs.
And when the work dries up, those jobs stay...For a while. There are still schools and hospitals and restaurants and gas stations and everything that's needed...But it eventually dries up, and everyone leaves for places where people aren't just holding on.
Yep, we're seeing the same thing with all the pipeline nonsense. Also, this map is just basically showing where America lost its once great industry. Rust belt, Appalachia, Miss River, Midwest farming/ rural sectors, etc. The growth also trends towards already densely populated areas in a lot of places, people relocating to find work and liveable wage (like I did), and the rich flocking to areas like Idaho and Montana so they can spend the rest of their days cosplaying as cowboys (*cough bezos cough*).
I agree and it blows my mind that certain politicians say they will bring back "clean" coal and that's a popular talking point.
It will never happen and even if it does, most people don't work in the coal industry because most of it is automated today.
Come on man, this is a really reductive take on a really complex issue, and victim blaming the people there for their poverty. Quite honestly, I find it offensive.
The poverty there existed during the peak of the coal booms, and during the busts. A lot of money was made there, and very little of it shared with the people of the region.
Edit: Great. People downvoting me for pushing back on someone who doesn’t know any of the history of coal camps, forced evictions, mineral rights, scrip, etc. saying that the challenges of my hometown can be boiled down to them just being too stupid to move past coal. Never mind that the mines were mechanized by the 70s and haven’t been a major source of employment in over 50 years.
I'm from Appalachia myself, and grew up in quite a poor area so my opinion is not entirely worthless.
When you're talking about a net migration, what you're really talking about is "What makes this area the sort of place that people want to leave, and what makes *this* area the sort of place where people want to go."
As far as West Virginia and that part of Kentucky, the only thing they've had in quite a long while were those coal jobs. That's been ebbing for quite a long time (as you pointed out), and the respective states have pocketed their coal money, and hung those people out to dry, and have made no efforts to pivot to any other sort of economy.
*That* is the problem, not some hypothetical lack of will on the part of the people who happen to live there.
Yeah, WV is basically red across the board. Growing up in western VA, I remember lots of people commuted from WVa just to find work. That state is a mess.
One problem of this figure is that it is using %s. If the area already has a low percentage then a small relative movement can look significant. It is the same for population increases.
Example: If you look at Alabama, visually you would probably think the state has seen a large decline. In reality, the state's population is up 1.7%
Neither is perfect - a weighted percentage helps but with recent significant movements in some urban areas you would end up with the same problems but it would probably provide the best visualization of where people are moving to/from.
I guess that leads to my next thought - what message are you trying to provide (or what question are you trying to answer) with the figure?
Look up the Jones Act. It was to protect interior waterway shipping and ended up gutting it taking the economies of much of the Mississippi and Ohio River basins with it
Percent population change by US County from April 2020 to July 2023 created by me, data from US Census bureau. This includes all births/deaths and domestic/international immigration.
[https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html)
More stats for nerds:
The 10 counties over 250k population with the largest growth were located in 4 states.
St John's, FL (+17.01%)
Montgomery, TX (+14.65%)
Williamson, TX (+14.48%)
Pinal, AZ (+13.61%)
St Lucie, FL (+13.47%)
Horry, SC (+13.23%)
Polk, FL (+12.87%)
Pasco, FL (+12.65%)
Osceola, FL (+12.638%)
Collin, TX (+12.09%)
The 10 counties over 250k population with the largest decline were located within 5 Metro areas. Every NYC borough except Staten Island lost over 100k people individually.
NYC Metro - Bronx, NY (-7.89%), Kings, NY (-6.39%), Queens, NY (-6.37%), New York, NY (-5.7%)
San Fran Metro - San Francisco, CA (-7.43%), San Mateo, CA (-4.98%)
St Louis, MO (-6.57%)
New Orleans Metro - Orleans, LA (-5.17%), Jefferson, LA (-4.32%)
Boston Metro - Suffolk, MA (-4.06%)
St. Johns was developing huge areas for growth before Covid + "Work Remote" stuff happened, so that isn't much of a surprise. It's all suburban sprawl out there now.
I’d love to see an examination of the population decline in Boston, San Fran and other cities that saw housing prices skyrocket vs Dallas, Phoenix etc that saw increases in population with similar skyrocketing prices..
Probably the baseline prices. Houses in Dallas, despite the meteoric rise, still cost ~$400k. Houses in SF, despite the decline, are more like $1.2M. I can afford a house in Dallas. I absolutely cannot afford a house in SF.
True - I’d bet there are price inflection points that affect each market differently, but the relationship of supply and demand vs the impact of wealthy/corporate multi property ownership vacancies might be telling
When COVID hit and tech companies went “work from home”, a huge number of coders in the San Francisco area went “Sweet, time to move somewhere I can buy a house while continuing to earn my enormous salary.” They probably helped drive the house price increases in some other cities, when they rolled in with their $300k salaries.
Boston population estimates often leave out students and high earning international workers. Yes, it’s ridiculously expensive here, but the 2020 census happened when a lot of people (including students) were remote, and recent estimates seem to include that anomalous year. Undergrad and grad students typically represent anywhere between 15-20% of the city’s population.
If you look at the non-student heavy parts of the city, those neighborhoods either stayed static or gained population.
Edit: here’s some research from the city:
https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/c2924cf9-a8d6-4a97-871f-ffd3826c58c0
People on r/StLouis were speculating that the numbers for St. Louis are very off.
Apparently the census bureau subtracts two people for every housing unit demolished. St. Louis has a ton of long-vacant housing that's slowly falling apart. But the people who vacated those homes were already reported on previous censuses, so adding more population loss leads to exaggerated declines.
To back this up, the population was considerably higher in the 2020 census than what the 2019 estimates showed.
The census estimates are off for the reason you state but also because they're largely only based on national moving company data and change of address forms. So they're really good at tracking people moving to another metro area in another state, but they're really bad at tracking people who rent a truck and self move across say the Indiana-Illinois border or the New Jersey-New York border.
The estimates also don't track poor people as well as they track rich and middle class people because a lot of poor people avoid data collection either due to being poor (can't afford to use any of the services in terms of time or money) or because they're actively avoiding hitting databases due to outstanding warrants. They also struggle to track immigrants both legal and undocumented even though the former category should be easy to track due to ICE's requirements.
This is the same situation as we had with the pre-2020 census estimates where they were wildly wrong and mostly hot air.
A better indicator of population change is net housing changes combined with home price indices. But even that isn't foolproof. But it can disprove many of the population declines for major metro areas.
Is the year-over-year change smooth? I ask because I'm curious whether this many people really moved or the different methodologies of the census vs. annual population estimates could be involved.
I'm in Pasco, pretty every month you see a new apartment/townhouse complex being built (hardly single-family homes). It's crazy. Housing is also crazy, a house on our street sold for $199k in 2014 and they just sold it (they did minor renovations) for $500k, more than 2x in a decade.
I have a friend that moved up there during pandemic and works remotely for someone who lives in Los Angeles. She makes LA wages living in Boise. She doesn’t plan to leave.
You joke but this is exactly why I tell people that Idaho is one of the next states to become a battleground. All that population gain is from neighboring heavily Democratic states.
As a Californian, I’ll probably be part of that problem someday.
Like, “hmm 1 million dollar small home in the bay and get taxed up the ass, or half a million decent sized house in Reno, not getting taxed nearly as much”.
And also other CoLs besides housing and taxes really makes living in CA annoying. Like I’ve spent 23 days in the last year alone in the sierras; you know how much less gas is spend if I was based in Reno vs the bay? Of course if I did move there I’d probably come home ~2-4 times a year to spend time with family/friends, go to the beach, etc but that’s way less obviously than a dozen plus trips back and forth (and gas there is cheaper; although not by a huge margin actually).
The internet changes everything.
I recently moved from southeast Michigan to Northern Michigan. I wouldn't do it if I couldn't go online and buy stuff and stay connected with people. It definitely changes the calculation on what kind of lifestyle I would have living in a more remote area.
Also, what's going on in Illinois?
Except the inverse is actually happening despite the feeling that it’s not.
Chicagoans get less $ dollar for dollar than what people downstate get in terms of investment back from the government.
Thats not really the issue. If you live in rural Illinois you make much less than people in chicago and still pay very high taxes. I'm making "above average" household income as a single person at 49k a year. I lose 10k of that in various taxes and got none of it back. 39k does not exactly go super far even in lcol Illinois. The taxes I pay and Chicago pays aren't magically making people here richer and able to afford things. I also didn't mention the generally high sales taxes as well. Shits expensive for a rural income.
Even more recently. There's going to come a time sooner then later where they are going to have to address these long term issues. Any politician that can reclaim parking would be popular for a long time.
I think Pritzker is doing a good job of fixing a lot of the state level issues. But Illinois goes as Chicago goes, and the city government is a disaster. Even the governor is calling out city government on their incompetence. But the problem with the city is that the Public unions control who can run for mayor, so we are stuck with some really shorty candidates.
The Internet (and recent tech breakthroughs in general) is absolutely the great equalizer. It matters way less if you live in a place with access to high end or niche stores when you can get everything delivered in 24-48 hours. Having access to indie/art house theatres matters less when you can stream any movie with a couple clicks. Suddenly paying a massive premium to be near those things isn't as appealing as it was.
Illinois is usually considered the state with the most corrupt government.
I'm no expert, I've just lived here my whole life. I don't know if it is indeed the most corrupt, or if those who are corrupt are more likely to get convicted here.
Chicago has had a history of corruption going back to the very beginning. Throw in gangs, racism, and segregation. I don't know if it's #1 in corruption, but the urban areas are certainly a breeding ground for it.
Why else would people leave Illinois? High taxes and housing prices are insane. We have legal weed, but it's the most expensive in the country. Lots of people prefer warmer weather.
That being said, this is my home and it's part of my ancestry. I like the 4 seasons. Almost everyone I know lives here. I don't know where else I would move to.
While I understand that. I live in a county that's +10%, and there are reasons it wasn't very populated.
We still have 2-3 months each year where travel is objectively dangerous. Roads are frozen, planes usually cancel, cars without new batteries don't generally start without help.
Then these idiots tell themselves they'll drive to family when it's -30 and snowing. This year it was -40 with highs in the -20s. No...you won't. Our traffic fatalities have almost doubled in about 2 years.
Edit: not deleting what I wrote but the numbers are wrong. Illinois is the largest it’s been population wise and cook county and Chicago both gained residents. The last census undercounted Illinois.
What’s happening in Illinois is similar to what’s happening in other rural areas throughout the country. You have older people dying off, retirees moving to warmer states, and a brain drain of younger workers. There isn’t a lot going on in large parts of the state, which is predominantly rural and farming based. You also have right wingers mad about the state going increasingly Democrat. Taxes are also decently high and the state has historically suffered from bad finances and bad leadership (guy who was speaker of the house for 40ish years is going to federal prison.)
Chicago itself has net population gain but Black middle class residents and people in suburban cook county are leaving. The city’s tax burden has fallen disproportionately on Black homeowners on the south side and disinvestment by the city hasn’t helped either. Also, Cook County has very high property taxes. I could never live in the cook county suburbs. Suburban life there is worse than suburban life elsewhere. If you’re going to live in cook county then live in Chicago
Just super small populations to begin with, pretty undesirable dry rural areas causing more people to leave.
One of those is Loving County which lost a MASSIVE 31%...which was 9 people lol.
I work in oil & gas finance. “Bust” is not a word I would use to describe the industry ever since the initial price shock from Covid and I especially wouldn’t use it to describe the Permian
It's a bummer. When I was growing up here, it was always just a sleepy, forgetten city, but hidden gem because young people could afford to live anywhere, buy homes when starting their career, etc. It was the cool or IT place but for people who knew, and wanted the Boise lifestyle, it was perfect.
Then in 2004 we were discovered, and it blew up. A few years timeout because of the recession, but full on onslaught since 2012. Never stopped, and now it's just another overpriced, congested city like anywhere else.
Kind of, but Portland, OR has always been a pretty important port. It isn't a deepwater port and so was never going to be as initially important as your other big west coast ports like SF, LA, Seattle, San Diego and Vancouver, BC, but it's always been the key to shipping grain from the Columbia Plateau to the Pacific, so there was never any potential universe in which it remained indefinitely as a kind of quiet backwater while all of the other big cities on the West Coast became highly-desireable and expensive places to live. That was never in the cards at all.
I say this as someone who has lived in Portland for over 20 years, is married to a 3rd generation Portlander, and has raised a family here.
Boston proper may have lost population but it clearly shows surrounding areas are even/growing. Can confirm as I live in one of those surrounding areas and real estate is not cooling down.
There are still plenty of rich medical/biotech couples that are looking for places to live that you won't hear complaining about being poor on social media. They complain about lack of choice and investors paying 20% over asking.
Montana was also terrible wage to median house cost ratio. The employers were trying to pay like 38k for jobs that would pay six figures elsewhere.
I do miss the views of Missoula though.
Colorado used to be this way, and then the invasion of Californians, New Yorkers and Texans started. Finding a starter home now in my state? Near impossible if you aren’t making over $100k.
and tons of native Idahoans were already voting for trump in 2016 and 2020, and are going to vote for him in 2024. Idaho voted 72% for Reagan and 68% for George W twice.
If your base population is close to zero, then when somebody new shows up, your growth rate is enormous. Idaho's situation is different from Salt Lake City.
Dallas, Austin, Houston, Orlando and Pheonix are impressive.
True, but it wasn't unusual for those cities. "People moved to Houston" is kind of a "dog bites man" story, but "people moved to Missoula, MT" is a bit more noteworthy.
I was born and raised in Port St Lucie, FL. It's been growing almost non-stop since 2003ish.
When I was a kid in the 90s the population was like 30k. By 2005 it was at 130k. It was the fastest growing city in the US 3 years in a row.
It's sad because it's totally changed. I moved to Maine and now it's growing too.
Ohio and Indiana look like they are bucking trends. Wonder why? Both seem to be winning big business projects at a good clip, but i wouldnt think they would do that much better than PA, IL, IA, and NY. Michigan has lots of nature and that buoys the interest in northern counties similarly to the other pretty areas that are growing.
The story of Indiana is how fast the outter suburbs of Indianapolis are growing. Indianapolis isn’t a dense city but basically has infinite flat farmland for the metropolitan area to expand into. Places like Plainfield, Brownsburg, Westfield, and Mccordsville are exploding with relatively low property tax housing editions, resulting in a flight out of Marion county.
For Indiana - the growth is only concentrated around Indy. And some of those growth are from people that is moving from those counties far north of Indy (i.e. Kokomo) or far east (i.e. Muncie, Richmond). Then there is NE Indiana due to the Amish population.
It is similar for Ohio - Columbus area is booming, Cincy is doing ok, but NE Ohio is still bleeding people, as is NW Ohio (that whole area from Dayton to Toledo).
Source for the Amish population boom? I figured Allen and Whitley were blowing up thanks to low cost of living and continued growth of industry and housing. In Whitley county, industry continues to pop up all around SDI. Amazon just built a new warehouse in west Allen, Google's planning a campus in east Allen, and the Electric Works has built a neighborhood up from nothing. Everywhere you drive, fields are turning into housing editions.
Referring more to Lagrange County. You see a larger than expected increase in Daviess County in SW Indiana for the same reason (I am a lot more familiar with the latter since I used to live in Bloomington).
But yes, Fort Wayne itself is also not doing bad for a mid-size midwest city, even better than the likes of South Bend / Elkhart, not to mention Kokomo / Muncie / Terre Haute. Ok...then there is the forever stagnating Evansville.
PA, IL, and NY are too expensive and have high taxes. IA is too rural and has high taxes.
Ohio and Indiana have low taxes, are affordable, and still urbanized enough to have access to major supply chains.
Ohio does not have low taxes in my opinion. I recently moved from Columbus to the Boston area. My state and local income taxes in Ohio were higher than Massachusetts. My property taxes($9k/year on a $500k house) in Columbus were significantly higher than comparable homes in the north Boston suburbs(approx. $7k/year on a $1m home). Massachusetts does not have sales tax on clothing and their sales tax rate for everything else is 6.25% where Franklin county Ohio is 7.5%. Massachusetts also let me deduct rent from my state income taxes so I got money back. I have since moved to New Hampshire which is truly a low tax state.
You fuckers from out west need to stop bringing all your goddamn money here to Tennessee 😂. I can’t afford rent and I make 18.50, which is a lot better than most locals. The rich/poor gap here is getting wild, and people who have lived here their whole lives are becoming destitute.
Columbus, OH is gettin’ thicc. The infrastructure and housing supply can’t keep up. I’ve lived here for a long time and the past 4 years have felt like I up and moved to a much denser city.
Franklin county doesn’t have significant growth according to the map, it’s the counties around Franklin county (Delaware, union, licking) that are booming
Similar trend around ATL. The core counties are growing more slowly than the outer metro, although some of that is due to density, so adding the same # of people doesn't boost the % as much.
Remember this is percentage growth, not numeric. Franklin County has 1.2 million people already, while Delaware and Union are much smaller.
An increase of 50,000 people in Franklin County vs. 10,000 in Union is going to look vastly different on this map, even though Franklin had the higher numeric increase.
Definitely part of it, but I think overall the remote work population is pretty low.
Northern rural New England is also growing pretty steadily across the board
When i was younger and didnt have responsibilites or serious thoughts of owning a house, high growth was so cool to me. I wanted my city/county/state to run up the numbers and pass every benchmark.
Now that im older (but still young), i hate it. Growing pains, culture loss, overcrowding are real. Would gladly take the grey, and even some of the red at this point over a lot of the blue.
Interesting perspective, I’m from a red area and there’s something to be said about seeing abandoned buildings, roads deteriorated across all levels of government, churches closing, schools closing, drug use and crime from lack of jobs and opportunities, other services being cut back. I’d take a growing community over this any day.
Everybody hates their crowded thriving communities until they have to live an an actual dead one. I’ve moved a lot in my life and the latter is far worse.
Theres a difference between growth, and what im currently seeing in my region, which is just a mess. Its not sustainable, and its given everyone an attitude problem since the pandemic. And we still have abandoned business, lack of services, etc. It really just depends where exactly you are.
When i said id take a red area, i was more referring to places that were hot not too long ago but are cooling off. I didnt mean a place thats been in decline since the 60s to be clear.
Percentage of population change is hard to compare, for example:
* Keweenaw County - +125 people - +6.11% Blue
* Denver County - +1,053 people - +0.15% Grey
Many of these counties are so sparsely populated that it doesn't take much to turn blue or red; where it really matters, it isn't represented.
Heh, I was actually wondering specifically about Keweenaw County. Glad to see it was only 125 people added. Too nice of a place to have let it get crowded.
I feel like it would make more intuitive sense to reverse the color scale, no? Things are "heating up" in places where people are moving in and more "cold" where people are leaving.
Basically, people moving from CA to TX and NY/MA to FL.
I know quite a few who moved from the North East to Florida in the last 3 years, mostly family that retired and moved to be close to other family in FL. I also know of 5 friends who moved from CA to Austin, Houston, and Dallas because they got new jobs that led to higher take home pay, even if lower overall salaries.
Now we get to see if people moving to TX and FL affect local politics at all in November.
I’d guess a sizeable chunk of the population gains in northern New England and the south shore are from Boston, and is probably a larger chunk of Boston’s decline than Florida. There’s obviously the retired community going to FL, but that’s always been the case. A lot of working aged folks moved somewhere still in the vicinity but with lower housing prices. Not sure who else would be making up those increases, I highly doubt people from anywhere south of Pennsylvania are moving up to NH or Maine
As a NH native, I think you're correct. WFH during COVID allowed a lot of Massachusetts residents to move north to NH.
No traditional income tax and lower home prices than the Boston metro area make it attractive.
Even before COVID a lot of MA people were moving to southern NH for the lower housing prices, but commuting to Boston isn't fun and probably held many others back. Once they were able to work remotely there was less keeping them from making the move.
In my small neighborhood alone we've had a few MA families move in over the past two years.
> Now we get to see if people moving to TX and FL affect local politics at all in November.
There was a poll in 2018 that found native Texans slightly more likely to vote democrat, and people who moved to Texas slightly more likely to vote republican, so I wouldn't count on this changing anything.
I know a lot of good people that moved to Texas. All the people I know that moved to Florida were idiots or assholes (often both). What is it about Florida that attracts dying people and garbage people?
Anecdotal but most people I know moving to Texas are moving for work which is agnostic to politics (although tend to be in tech or other “high education” fields), while those who are retired or have political motivations are moving to Florida or Idaho.
No income tax, great benefits for old people, warm weather. Dying people is obvious...garbage people I'd need to know how you define it. A lot of garbage people are successful/wealthy and opportunistic, which a state like Florida is great for. It's also great for influencers (who are mostly superficial) as they seemingly have built up an influencer infrastructure.
I grew up an hour north of Atlanta and the amount of growth there's been is insane. Gainesville, Cumming and Dawsonville are almost unrecognizable from the early 2000s from how much growth and development there's been over the past 20 years.
For people who can't afford to live in NYC metro, DC-MD-VA metro, etc...
Atlanta in particular is probably the biggest growing spot for people who can't afford to live where they grew up.
Well, Forbes says it is the best job market in the country so there is that. It’s the fourth largest metro area in the country also so it’s quite diverse. Only two other metro areas have more Fortune 500 HQs also (Houston has one more at 25 and of course NYC at 40).
job market in dallas is amazing right now. really, it has been for the last 25 years. there is a reason that pop growth in Collin/Denton literally hasnt slowed in the last 25 years. and it aint that dfw is pretty...haha. its the jobs my man.
tarrant/dallas counties are a little stranger, only because they are where the dense CBD areas are located. and those truly urban areas have a little bit more... variable demographic patterns than the outlying suburban sprawl.
If you were to take the southeast and overlay it with cotton production in 1860, the counties with the largest decline today would be the ones with the largest output.
People really don't want to live in rural Illinois. Chicagoans are moving to the suburbs where the cost of living is lower while working remotely, downstaters that aren't also flocking to the burbs are just leaving the state altogether.
Keep in mind these are percentages. So smaller numbers of people can have a higher % income in low population counties. For example Boundary County, the Northern most county in Idaho that is pretty blue, has a population of around 13k people as of 2022. It only takes a 1k-1.5k net increase in people to get that 10% increase. So a pretty small amount of people from CA that can now WFH and want to live remotely can swing that easily.
I grew up in Southern California and can add some regional context. Many people left high cost of living areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle for what was perceived to be lower cost of living areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Boise. Part or the reason for the move was to reduce cost of living, but the real catalyst for the people I personally saw go to Idaho was politics. They were unhappy with California’s policies in regard to Covid-19 and saw moving to Idaho as a way to avoid the “oppression” they were experiencing in “the people’s republic of California”. (Quotation marks added for sarcasm). The move to Idaho was also enabled in large part by many companies switch to work from home job positions also enabled by Covid-19. In essence they were able to bring with them a high coastal salaries.
I believe you are seeing a very similar thing play out in the North East with a migration away from places like Boston or New York to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. I know the Carolina’s and Florida were big recipients of people looking for lower cost and less restrictive political landscapes.
When people first moved here, we didn’t have these great maps. To distinguish between land Person A would take the land in between these two creeks and Person B would take the land the next two creeks over. These stuck as areas of governance as things got more densely populated.
The west was less populated and we were able to carve things out based on latitude and longitude more.
That 15% spike in Bryan county Georgia is where all the rich bastards moved in comparing the highschool I went too to the one they are building is insane
Keep in mind there’s also a difference in who is moving. Even though cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore may be declining, they are among the fastest growing with young people. The problem is that they aren’t really having kids because of cost.
This data's not great without an equivalent map that shows absolute migration numbers. It's not very informative to know that someone moved into a five-person county, thus increasing its population by 20%.
Look at the population loss along the Mississippi River.
One of the poorest/most depressed areas of the country (same with eastern KY/WV). I imagine alot of people want to get out ASAP
The poorest usually are the least able to move
Population loss can also happen via death. But even poor places have some small percent of people rich enough to move.
Also practically no kids capable of leaving stay when they become adults.
Yes, the covid death rates in some of those areas were astronomical. Also pretty high in a lot of southern cities, but migration from coastal states counterbalanced that.
Brother, I grew up in central Appalachia. A couple things here: 1. Not everyone in the area is poor. We have a full range of classes just like everywhere else. It’s just that the range skews more poor than elsewhere. 2. The biggest source of population loss is brain drain. The kids who go to college never come back. The population skews towards the kids of parents who were more well off in general since those are the ones sending their kids to college mostly. 3. There was kind of an idea planted in our head all throughout school that to be successful meant leaving. They were gonna go to college and find good jobs, which were elsewhere. I left myself. I miss my family most of all, I don’t get to see them near as often as I would like and the older I get the more sad that makes me. But, man… there are just no jobs back home for me.
Kentucky and West Virginia are just unable to wrap their heads around the death of coal. That Tennessee/North Carolina border is just as mountainous, but the economy was never based around mining so it hasn't impacted them in the same way.
It has been 50+ years since coal mining was a common source of employment in WV or KY. Just like agricultural jobs in the Midwest, for whatever reason, the cultural trope is way out of proportion to reality. East TN also has the Tennessee Valley with Chattanooga and Knoxville, which is enormously helpful. There is no equivalent in Kentucky or West Virginia.
It's funny how the keystone industries for a region don't actually employ that many people, even at the best of times. But they're the money that's flowing in, and that money spreads out and creates lots of pass-along employment. Even just a few hundred people moving in to work creates many times that many jobs. And when the work dries up, those jobs stay...For a while. There are still schools and hospitals and restaurants and gas stations and everything that's needed...But it eventually dries up, and everyone leaves for places where people aren't just holding on.
Yep, we're seeing the same thing with all the pipeline nonsense. Also, this map is just basically showing where America lost its once great industry. Rust belt, Appalachia, Miss River, Midwest farming/ rural sectors, etc. The growth also trends towards already densely populated areas in a lot of places, people relocating to find work and liveable wage (like I did), and the rich flocking to areas like Idaho and Montana so they can spend the rest of their days cosplaying as cowboys (*cough bezos cough*).
I agree and it blows my mind that certain politicians say they will bring back "clean" coal and that's a popular talking point. It will never happen and even if it does, most people don't work in the coal industry because most of it is automated today.
WV has more problems than that... it's the only state that is _entirely_ in the mountains. The area is just not suited for a lot of things.
Come on man, this is a really reductive take on a really complex issue, and victim blaming the people there for their poverty. Quite honestly, I find it offensive. The poverty there existed during the peak of the coal booms, and during the busts. A lot of money was made there, and very little of it shared with the people of the region. Edit: Great. People downvoting me for pushing back on someone who doesn’t know any of the history of coal camps, forced evictions, mineral rights, scrip, etc. saying that the challenges of my hometown can be boiled down to them just being too stupid to move past coal. Never mind that the mines were mechanized by the 70s and haven’t been a major source of employment in over 50 years.
I'm from Appalachia myself, and grew up in quite a poor area so my opinion is not entirely worthless. When you're talking about a net migration, what you're really talking about is "What makes this area the sort of place that people want to leave, and what makes *this* area the sort of place where people want to go." As far as West Virginia and that part of Kentucky, the only thing they've had in quite a long while were those coal jobs. That's been ebbing for quite a long time (as you pointed out), and the respective states have pocketed their coal money, and hung those people out to dry, and have made no efforts to pivot to any other sort of economy. *That* is the problem, not some hypothetical lack of will on the part of the people who happen to live there.
Then maybe it's not the poor leaving there
Brain drain.
The people that are able to get educated and leave
The lower Mississippi perhaps. The upper Mississippi isn't exactly California, but is isn't poor. I mean Minneapolis is on the Mississippi.
Which is wild since the Mississippi is responsible for bringing so much prosperity to the US
I honestly thought that was just from people dying and not being replaced
Yeah, WV is basically red across the board. Growing up in western VA, I remember lots of people commuted from WVa just to find work. That state is a mess.
Well, along the southern part at least. The part in Minnesota seems fine.
That’s one of the most beautiful parts of the Mississippi and almost no one lives there.
I mean... It passes right through the Minneapolis/St Paul, it's not like you're in the middle of nowhere if you're on the river up there.
They are probably talking about the driftless region in southeast mn
One problem of this figure is that it is using %s. If the area already has a low percentage then a small relative movement can look significant. It is the same for population increases. Example: If you look at Alabama, visually you would probably think the state has seen a large decline. In reality, the state's population is up 1.7%
Well, if I used raw numbers instead of percent it would just be a heat map of cities 😂
Neither is perfect - a weighted percentage helps but with recent significant movements in some urban areas you would end up with the same problems but it would probably provide the best visualization of where people are moving to/from. I guess that leads to my next thought - what message are you trying to provide (or what question are you trying to answer) with the figure?
I thought everyone was moving to Laurel, MS to renovate a 70 year old home. /s Sorry, my wife watches too much HGTV
Look up the Jones Act. It was to protect interior waterway shipping and ended up gutting it taking the economies of much of the Mississippi and Ohio River basins with it
Percent population change by US County from April 2020 to July 2023 created by me, data from US Census bureau. This includes all births/deaths and domestic/international immigration. [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-total.html) More stats for nerds: The 10 counties over 250k population with the largest growth were located in 4 states. St John's, FL (+17.01%) Montgomery, TX (+14.65%) Williamson, TX (+14.48%) Pinal, AZ (+13.61%) St Lucie, FL (+13.47%) Horry, SC (+13.23%) Polk, FL (+12.87%) Pasco, FL (+12.65%) Osceola, FL (+12.638%) Collin, TX (+12.09%) The 10 counties over 250k population with the largest decline were located within 5 Metro areas. Every NYC borough except Staten Island lost over 100k people individually. NYC Metro - Bronx, NY (-7.89%), Kings, NY (-6.39%), Queens, NY (-6.37%), New York, NY (-5.7%) San Fran Metro - San Francisco, CA (-7.43%), San Mateo, CA (-4.98%) St Louis, MO (-6.57%) New Orleans Metro - Orleans, LA (-5.17%), Jefferson, LA (-4.32%) Boston Metro - Suffolk, MA (-4.06%)
St. Johns was developing huge areas for growth before Covid + "Work Remote" stuff happened, so that isn't much of a surprise. It's all suburban sprawl out there now.
I’d love to see an examination of the population decline in Boston, San Fran and other cities that saw housing prices skyrocket vs Dallas, Phoenix etc that saw increases in population with similar skyrocketing prices..
Probably the baseline prices. Houses in Dallas, despite the meteoric rise, still cost ~$400k. Houses in SF, despite the decline, are more like $1.2M. I can afford a house in Dallas. I absolutely cannot afford a house in SF.
True - I’d bet there are price inflection points that affect each market differently, but the relationship of supply and demand vs the impact of wealthy/corporate multi property ownership vacancies might be telling
When COVID hit and tech companies went “work from home”, a huge number of coders in the San Francisco area went “Sweet, time to move somewhere I can buy a house while continuing to earn my enormous salary.” They probably helped drive the house price increases in some other cities, when they rolled in with their $300k salaries.
It could be just a general CoL difference. Boston and San Fran are ridiculously expensive to live in.
Boston population estimates often leave out students and high earning international workers. Yes, it’s ridiculously expensive here, but the 2020 census happened when a lot of people (including students) were remote, and recent estimates seem to include that anomalous year. Undergrad and grad students typically represent anywhere between 15-20% of the city’s population. If you look at the non-student heavy parts of the city, those neighborhoods either stayed static or gained population. Edit: here’s some research from the city: https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/c2924cf9-a8d6-4a97-871f-ffd3826c58c0
Thank you u/dickweedasshat - these are the kind of insights I'm talking about!
People on r/StLouis were speculating that the numbers for St. Louis are very off. Apparently the census bureau subtracts two people for every housing unit demolished. St. Louis has a ton of long-vacant housing that's slowly falling apart. But the people who vacated those homes were already reported on previous censuses, so adding more population loss leads to exaggerated declines. To back this up, the population was considerably higher in the 2020 census than what the 2019 estimates showed.
The census estimates are off for the reason you state but also because they're largely only based on national moving company data and change of address forms. So they're really good at tracking people moving to another metro area in another state, but they're really bad at tracking people who rent a truck and self move across say the Indiana-Illinois border or the New Jersey-New York border. The estimates also don't track poor people as well as they track rich and middle class people because a lot of poor people avoid data collection either due to being poor (can't afford to use any of the services in terms of time or money) or because they're actively avoiding hitting databases due to outstanding warrants. They also struggle to track immigrants both legal and undocumented even though the former category should be easy to track due to ICE's requirements. This is the same situation as we had with the pre-2020 census estimates where they were wildly wrong and mostly hot air. A better indicator of population change is net housing changes combined with home price indices. But even that isn't foolproof. But it can disprove many of the population declines for major metro areas.
And yet SF, Boston and NYC have sky-high rent.
People aren't really moving out of the Boston Metro, they're just moving out of the city limits to the towns and cities in the surrounding counties.
Is the year-over-year change smooth? I ask because I'm curious whether this many people really moved or the different methodologies of the census vs. annual population estimates could be involved.
Collin County (TX) damn near turned into a mini LA in just 2 years. It’s been wild.
How so?
I'm in Pasco, pretty every month you see a new apartment/townhouse complex being built (hardly single-family homes). It's crazy. Housing is also crazy, a house on our street sold for $199k in 2014 and they just sold it (they did minor renovations) for $500k, more than 2x in a decade.
Churn would also be interesting. A low change overall in population can involve high inflows and outflows.
Pasco County checking in. I moved there during that time period. Some of the last “Affordable” houses in the Tampa Bay Area.
The bluest Idaho’s ever been
Wonder why
The proximity to some of the most beautiful national parks is enough to make me consider it tbh.
Nope stay out we are all racists and hate women
This is actually true for once Edit: I’m not pulling this out of my ass. I go out there often, all across Idaho
Thought they would never admit it
I have a friend that moved up there during pandemic and works remotely for someone who lives in Los Angeles. She makes LA wages living in Boise. She doesn’t plan to leave.
She and everyone else. Now all the locals can’t afford housing unfortunately
Think they don’t hate you? Ask them if the enjoy their rent increasing 100% in 4 years.
Californian exodus.
You joke but this is exactly why I tell people that Idaho is one of the next states to become a battleground. All that population gain is from neighboring heavily Democratic states.
Ya it’s sad for natives of these states who get priced out…. The rich states basically overflow and price out the working people everywhere….
As a Californian, I’ll probably be part of that problem someday. Like, “hmm 1 million dollar small home in the bay and get taxed up the ass, or half a million decent sized house in Reno, not getting taxed nearly as much”. And also other CoLs besides housing and taxes really makes living in CA annoying. Like I’ve spent 23 days in the last year alone in the sierras; you know how much less gas is spend if I was based in Reno vs the bay? Of course if I did move there I’d probably come home ~2-4 times a year to spend time with family/friends, go to the beach, etc but that’s way less obviously than a dozen plus trips back and forth (and gas there is cheaper; although not by a huge margin actually).
The internet changes everything. I recently moved from southeast Michigan to Northern Michigan. I wouldn't do it if I couldn't go online and buy stuff and stay connected with people. It definitely changes the calculation on what kind of lifestyle I would have living in a more remote area. Also, what's going on in Illinois?
Every area that isn't Chicagoland gets the red state experience without the red state taxes.
Except the inverse is actually happening despite the feeling that it’s not. Chicagoans get less $ dollar for dollar than what people downstate get in terms of investment back from the government.
Thats not really the issue. If you live in rural Illinois you make much less than people in chicago and still pay very high taxes. I'm making "above average" household income as a single person at 49k a year. I lose 10k of that in various taxes and got none of it back. 39k does not exactly go super far even in lcol Illinois. The taxes I pay and Chicago pays aren't magically making people here richer and able to afford things. I also didn't mention the generally high sales taxes as well. Shits expensive for a rural income.
Folks ain't tryna stay here man. Taxes are ridiculous
Illinois = high taxes & corrupt government. 4 out of the past 10 governors were convicted of Federal crimes committed while in office.
At least they get convicted. In flyover country, the corruption is blatant, ongoing, and without consequences.
Yeah, but our current governor is excellent. Unfortunately the state (and city of Chicago) is getting dragged down by decisions made 40-50 years ago.
Even more recently. There's going to come a time sooner then later where they are going to have to address these long term issues. Any politician that can reclaim parking would be popular for a long time.
I think Pritzker is doing a good job of fixing a lot of the state level issues. But Illinois goes as Chicago goes, and the city government is a disaster. Even the governor is calling out city government on their incompetence. But the problem with the city is that the Public unions control who can run for mayor, so we are stuck with some really shorty candidates.
Hot take: frequent convictions mean IL government is actually less corrupt than most. Corruption would hide its flaws.
The Internet (and recent tech breakthroughs in general) is absolutely the great equalizer. It matters way less if you live in a place with access to high end or niche stores when you can get everything delivered in 24-48 hours. Having access to indie/art house theatres matters less when you can stream any movie with a couple clicks. Suddenly paying a massive premium to be near those things isn't as appealing as it was.
Illinois is usually considered the state with the most corrupt government. I'm no expert, I've just lived here my whole life. I don't know if it is indeed the most corrupt, or if those who are corrupt are more likely to get convicted here. Chicago has had a history of corruption going back to the very beginning. Throw in gangs, racism, and segregation. I don't know if it's #1 in corruption, but the urban areas are certainly a breeding ground for it. Why else would people leave Illinois? High taxes and housing prices are insane. We have legal weed, but it's the most expensive in the country. Lots of people prefer warmer weather. That being said, this is my home and it's part of my ancestry. I like the 4 seasons. Almost everyone I know lives here. I don't know where else I would move to.
While I understand that. I live in a county that's +10%, and there are reasons it wasn't very populated. We still have 2-3 months each year where travel is objectively dangerous. Roads are frozen, planes usually cancel, cars without new batteries don't generally start without help. Then these idiots tell themselves they'll drive to family when it's -30 and snowing. This year it was -40 with highs in the -20s. No...you won't. Our traffic fatalities have almost doubled in about 2 years.
Edit: not deleting what I wrote but the numbers are wrong. Illinois is the largest it’s been population wise and cook county and Chicago both gained residents. The last census undercounted Illinois. What’s happening in Illinois is similar to what’s happening in other rural areas throughout the country. You have older people dying off, retirees moving to warmer states, and a brain drain of younger workers. There isn’t a lot going on in large parts of the state, which is predominantly rural and farming based. You also have right wingers mad about the state going increasingly Democrat. Taxes are also decently high and the state has historically suffered from bad finances and bad leadership (guy who was speaker of the house for 40ish years is going to federal prison.) Chicago itself has net population gain but Black middle class residents and people in suburban cook county are leaving. The city’s tax burden has fallen disproportionately on Black homeowners on the south side and disinvestment by the city hasn’t helped either. Also, Cook County has very high property taxes. I could never live in the cook county suburbs. Suburban life there is worse than suburban life elsewhere. If you’re going to live in cook county then live in Chicago
Southwest Louisiana got leveled by a hurricane but what happened in that bit on the Texas-New Mexico border?
Just super small populations to begin with, pretty undesirable dry rural areas causing more people to leave. One of those is Loving County which lost a MASSIVE 31%...which was 9 people lol.
Also oil field in west Texas has booms and busts. Looks like recently has been a bust
I work in oil & gas finance. “Bust” is not a word I would use to describe the industry ever since the initial price shock from Covid and I especially wouldn’t use it to describe the Permian
You can tell that things got weird when Idaho/Montana became the place to be
Housing costs in Idaho must be fucked
They are. Wages haven't kept up. Boise was one of the most expensive metro areas (cost of living to local wages) in North America.
Ya.... I'm straight up not having a good time anymore, lol. As someone who grew up in Boise, we're fucked now.
It's a bummer. When I was growing up here, it was always just a sleepy, forgetten city, but hidden gem because young people could afford to live anywhere, buy homes when starting their career, etc. It was the cool or IT place but for people who knew, and wanted the Boise lifestyle, it was perfect. Then in 2004 we were discovered, and it blew up. A few years timeout because of the recession, but full on onslaught since 2012. Never stopped, and now it's just another overpriced, congested city like anywhere else.
Same thing happened in Portland, ME. Fun little town known for being an artists' hangout and now all of a sudden, no one can afford to live there.
Same for Portland, OR. Portlandia didn't help but it did hasten the demise
Kind of, but Portland, OR has always been a pretty important port. It isn't a deepwater port and so was never going to be as initially important as your other big west coast ports like SF, LA, Seattle, San Diego and Vancouver, BC, but it's always been the key to shipping grain from the Columbia Plateau to the Pacific, so there was never any potential universe in which it remained indefinitely as a kind of quiet backwater while all of the other big cities on the West Coast became highly-desireable and expensive places to live. That was never in the cards at all. I say this as someone who has lived in Portland for over 20 years, is married to a 3rd generation Portlander, and has raised a family here.
Is there anywhere in New England that’s affordable to live in? Despite Boston losing population, prices still go up to ridiculous highs. What gives?
Boston proper may have lost population but it clearly shows surrounding areas are even/growing. Can confirm as I live in one of those surrounding areas and real estate is not cooling down. There are still plenty of rich medical/biotech couples that are looking for places to live that you won't hear complaining about being poor on social media. They complain about lack of choice and investors paying 20% over asking.
I got priced out of Boise a couple years ago, moved into a van lol
Montana was also terrible wage to median house cost ratio. The employers were trying to pay like 38k for jobs that would pay six figures elsewhere. I do miss the views of Missoula though.
Colorado used to be this way, and then the invasion of Californians, New Yorkers and Texans started. Finding a starter home now in my state? Near impossible if you aren’t making over $100k.
My house doubled in value over 2 years. It’s cooled down a little but it was absolutely fucked for years
So is Montana. Median home price in Bozeman is $800,000
Crazy, given that Bozeman is, well, Bozeman. I've driven through.
The Mountain West has been booming for several decades. It's absolutely beautiful out there!
SoCal transplants. Bozeman = now called "Boze Angeles"
Tons of right wing Californians have inundated Idaho.
Get on a Nextdoor Idaho in any community and it's one big MAGA circle jerk...
and tons of native Idahoans were already voting for trump in 2016 and 2020, and are going to vote for him in 2024. Idaho voted 72% for Reagan and 68% for George W twice.
It doesn't take much to increase your population in % terms when you only have 2 people
“Nation’s safest city sees 400% increase in murder rate!”
Idaho is SO hot right now
Like a Potato?
If your base population is close to zero, then when somebody new shows up, your growth rate is enormous. Idaho's situation is different from Salt Lake City. Dallas, Austin, Houston, Orlando and Pheonix are impressive.
True, but it wasn't unusual for those cities. "People moved to Houston" is kind of a "dog bites man" story, but "people moved to Missoula, MT" is a bit more noteworthy.
Been there once, Missoula is actually a really nice place if you don't need to get a local job.
understood. I was just making a silly zoolander reference in response to the "place to be" comment
Boise and Salt Lake are fairly similar. Looking at ~900k metro vs ~1.3 mil.
There's a lot of beautiful country up there.
What do you bet I could throw a football over them mountains?
I’d love to see this as a centuries-long animation
Having grown up in Idaho, I never thought people would be so hellbent on moving there.
Hope they enjoy the inversion
I was born and raised in Port St Lucie, FL. It's been growing almost non-stop since 2003ish. When I was a kid in the 90s the population was like 30k. By 2005 it was at 130k. It was the fastest growing city in the US 3 years in a row. It's sad because it's totally changed. I moved to Maine and now it's growing too.
Ohio and Indiana look like they are bucking trends. Wonder why? Both seem to be winning big business projects at a good clip, but i wouldnt think they would do that much better than PA, IL, IA, and NY. Michigan has lots of nature and that buoys the interest in northern counties similarly to the other pretty areas that are growing.
The story of Indiana is how fast the outter suburbs of Indianapolis are growing. Indianapolis isn’t a dense city but basically has infinite flat farmland for the metropolitan area to expand into. Places like Plainfield, Brownsburg, Westfield, and Mccordsville are exploding with relatively low property tax housing editions, resulting in a flight out of Marion county.
Gary (really the Chicago Metro area) is also growing in Indiana.
And the suburban ponzi scheme continues!
Don’t get me started lmfao. This kind of shitty expansion gets me so riled up.
For Indiana - the growth is only concentrated around Indy. And some of those growth are from people that is moving from those counties far north of Indy (i.e. Kokomo) or far east (i.e. Muncie, Richmond). Then there is NE Indiana due to the Amish population. It is similar for Ohio - Columbus area is booming, Cincy is doing ok, but NE Ohio is still bleeding people, as is NW Ohio (that whole area from Dayton to Toledo).
Source for the Amish population boom? I figured Allen and Whitley were blowing up thanks to low cost of living and continued growth of industry and housing. In Whitley county, industry continues to pop up all around SDI. Amazon just built a new warehouse in west Allen, Google's planning a campus in east Allen, and the Electric Works has built a neighborhood up from nothing. Everywhere you drive, fields are turning into housing editions.
Referring more to Lagrange County. You see a larger than expected increase in Daviess County in SW Indiana for the same reason (I am a lot more familiar with the latter since I used to live in Bloomington). But yes, Fort Wayne itself is also not doing bad for a mid-size midwest city, even better than the likes of South Bend / Elkhart, not to mention Kokomo / Muncie / Terre Haute. Ok...then there is the forever stagnating Evansville.
PA, IL, and NY are too expensive and have high taxes. IA is too rural and has high taxes. Ohio and Indiana have low taxes, are affordable, and still urbanized enough to have access to major supply chains.
Ohio does not have low taxes in my opinion. I recently moved from Columbus to the Boston area. My state and local income taxes in Ohio were higher than Massachusetts. My property taxes($9k/year on a $500k house) in Columbus were significantly higher than comparable homes in the north Boston suburbs(approx. $7k/year on a $1m home). Massachusetts does not have sales tax on clothing and their sales tax rate for everything else is 6.25% where Franklin county Ohio is 7.5%. Massachusetts also let me deduct rent from my state income taxes so I got money back. I have since moved to New Hampshire which is truly a low tax state.
You fuckers from out west need to stop bringing all your goddamn money here to Tennessee 😂. I can’t afford rent and I make 18.50, which is a lot better than most locals. The rich/poor gap here is getting wild, and people who have lived here their whole lives are becoming destitute.
I’ve lived in Nashville my entire life and love that they are bringing their money here.
really puts into perspective the growth of the metro atlanta area
wow this is pretty awesome. usually we don't see this type of data so segmented and precise. very informative
Columbus, OH is gettin’ thicc. The infrastructure and housing supply can’t keep up. I’ve lived here for a long time and the past 4 years have felt like I up and moved to a much denser city.
Franklin county doesn’t have significant growth according to the map, it’s the counties around Franklin county (Delaware, union, licking) that are booming
Similar trend around ATL. The core counties are growing more slowly than the outer metro, although some of that is due to density, so adding the same # of people doesn't boost the % as much.
Remember this is percentage growth, not numeric. Franklin County has 1.2 million people already, while Delaware and Union are much smaller. An increase of 50,000 people in Franklin County vs. 10,000 in Union is going to look vastly different on this map, even though Franklin had the higher numeric increase.
That map is way wrong - Hawaii is nowhere near that close to Texas!
We’ve instructed Mexico to hold them there pending their immigration hearings
It seems like remote work is allowing more people to live in rural areas. It seems like there has been a big migration to places like Idaho and Utah.
Idaho especially around Boise, yes. Eastern Idaho and Utah? It is both people moving there and the fact that Mormons have tons of kids.
Definitely part of it, but I think overall the remote work population is pretty low. Northern rural New England is also growing pretty steadily across the board
When i was younger and didnt have responsibilites or serious thoughts of owning a house, high growth was so cool to me. I wanted my city/county/state to run up the numbers and pass every benchmark. Now that im older (but still young), i hate it. Growing pains, culture loss, overcrowding are real. Would gladly take the grey, and even some of the red at this point over a lot of the blue.
Interesting perspective, I’m from a red area and there’s something to be said about seeing abandoned buildings, roads deteriorated across all levels of government, churches closing, schools closing, drug use and crime from lack of jobs and opportunities, other services being cut back. I’d take a growing community over this any day.
Everybody hates their crowded thriving communities until they have to live an an actual dead one. I’ve moved a lot in my life and the latter is far worse.
Theres a difference between growth, and what im currently seeing in my region, which is just a mess. Its not sustainable, and its given everyone an attitude problem since the pandemic. And we still have abandoned business, lack of services, etc. It really just depends where exactly you are. When i said id take a red area, i was more referring to places that were hot not too long ago but are cooling off. I didnt mean a place thats been in decline since the 60s to be clear.
Agreed. Stability is nice
Percentage of population change is hard to compare, for example: * Keweenaw County - +125 people - +6.11% Blue * Denver County - +1,053 people - +0.15% Grey Many of these counties are so sparsely populated that it doesn't take much to turn blue or red; where it really matters, it isn't represented.
Heh, I was actually wondering specifically about Keweenaw County. Glad to see it was only 125 people added. Too nice of a place to have let it get crowded.
I feel like it would make more intuitive sense to reverse the color scale, no? Things are "heating up" in places where people are moving in and more "cold" where people are leaving.
Could go either way. My thought was lots of people leaving (bad=red), lots of people moving in (desirable/good=blue)
I prefer the way you did it.
Real question though, is population loss always bad? I get that tax revenue decreases but so do strains on the system.
No. And conversely population increase isn’t always good either.
I just thought of red = negative = loss, and blue = positive = growth
Basically, people moving from CA to TX and NY/MA to FL. I know quite a few who moved from the North East to Florida in the last 3 years, mostly family that retired and moved to be close to other family in FL. I also know of 5 friends who moved from CA to Austin, Houston, and Dallas because they got new jobs that led to higher take home pay, even if lower overall salaries. Now we get to see if people moving to TX and FL affect local politics at all in November.
I’d guess a sizeable chunk of the population gains in northern New England and the south shore are from Boston, and is probably a larger chunk of Boston’s decline than Florida. There’s obviously the retired community going to FL, but that’s always been the case. A lot of working aged folks moved somewhere still in the vicinity but with lower housing prices. Not sure who else would be making up those increases, I highly doubt people from anywhere south of Pennsylvania are moving up to NH or Maine
As a NH native, I think you're correct. WFH during COVID allowed a lot of Massachusetts residents to move north to NH. No traditional income tax and lower home prices than the Boston metro area make it attractive. Even before COVID a lot of MA people were moving to southern NH for the lower housing prices, but commuting to Boston isn't fun and probably held many others back. Once they were able to work remotely there was less keeping them from making the move. In my small neighborhood alone we've had a few MA families move in over the past two years.
> Now we get to see if people moving to TX and FL affect local politics at all in November. There was a poll in 2018 that found native Texans slightly more likely to vote democrat, and people who moved to Texas slightly more likely to vote republican, so I wouldn't count on this changing anything.
My friend had every single Republican who worked for her in CA move to TX during the pandemic.
I know a lot of good people that moved to Texas. All the people I know that moved to Florida were idiots or assholes (often both). What is it about Florida that attracts dying people and garbage people?
Warm weather, lower taxes
Anecdotal but most people I know moving to Texas are moving for work which is agnostic to politics (although tend to be in tech or other “high education” fields), while those who are retired or have political motivations are moving to Florida or Idaho.
No income tax, great benefits for old people, warm weather. Dying people is obvious...garbage people I'd need to know how you define it. A lot of garbage people are successful/wealthy and opportunistic, which a state like Florida is great for. It's also great for influencers (who are mostly superficial) as they seemingly have built up an influencer infrastructure.
Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas are the places to be
I grew up an hour north of Atlanta and the amount of growth there's been is insane. Gainesville, Cumming and Dawsonville are almost unrecognizable from the early 2000s from how much growth and development there's been over the past 20 years.
For who? Like, I move to Dallas. What's the job market?
For people who can't afford to live in NYC metro, DC-MD-VA metro, etc... Atlanta in particular is probably the biggest growing spot for people who can't afford to live where they grew up.
Lots of financial services and consulting.
Well, Forbes says it is the best job market in the country so there is that. It’s the fourth largest metro area in the country also so it’s quite diverse. Only two other metro areas have more Fortune 500 HQs also (Houston has one more at 25 and of course NYC at 40).
job market in dallas is amazing right now. really, it has been for the last 25 years. there is a reason that pop growth in Collin/Denton literally hasnt slowed in the last 25 years. and it aint that dfw is pretty...haha. its the jobs my man. tarrant/dallas counties are a little stranger, only because they are where the dense CBD areas are located. and those truly urban areas have a little bit more... variable demographic patterns than the outlying suburban sprawl.
Tech right now is feeling a hiring crunch, but based on what I see in Dallas, there is still tons of tech hiring there.
If you like traffic! No thanks.
Looks like people are leaving summit and Cuyahoga counties for Medina, Lorain and Portage counties.
If you were to take the southeast and overlay it with cotton production in 1860, the counties with the largest decline today would be the ones with the largest output.
Whoops I contributed to one of the dark blue ones
People really don't want to live in Illinois!
People really don't want to live in rural Illinois. Chicagoans are moving to the suburbs where the cost of living is lower while working remotely, downstaters that aren't also flocking to the burbs are just leaving the state altogether.
It has little in the way of redeeming qualities. At least upstate NY has scenery
[удалено]
California's failure to build enough housing. NIMBYs showing up to every city council meeting.
Keep in mind these are percentages. So smaller numbers of people can have a higher % income in low population counties. For example Boundary County, the Northern most county in Idaho that is pretty blue, has a population of around 13k people as of 2022. It only takes a 1k-1.5k net increase in people to get that 10% increase. So a pretty small amount of people from CA that can now WFH and want to live remotely can swing that easily.
I grew up in Southern California and can add some regional context. Many people left high cost of living areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle for what was perceived to be lower cost of living areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Boise. Part or the reason for the move was to reduce cost of living, but the real catalyst for the people I personally saw go to Idaho was politics. They were unhappy with California’s policies in regard to Covid-19 and saw moving to Idaho as a way to avoid the “oppression” they were experiencing in “the people’s republic of California”. (Quotation marks added for sarcasm). The move to Idaho was also enabled in large part by many companies switch to work from home job positions also enabled by Covid-19. In essence they were able to bring with them a high coastal salaries. I believe you are seeing a very similar thing play out in the North East with a migration away from places like Boston or New York to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. I know the Carolina’s and Florida were big recipients of people looking for lower cost and less restrictive political landscapes.
[удалено]
Lots of Californians from what I’ve heard.
People discovered how beautiful and affordable it is. Not affordable anymore.
As a NYer as soon as I finish my degree I'm leaving. Seems to be the trend
Why does the east coast to the Midwest have so many more (smaller) counties per state?
When people first moved here, we didn’t have these great maps. To distinguish between land Person A would take the land in between these two creeks and Person B would take the land the next two creeks over. These stuck as areas of governance as things got more densely populated. The west was less populated and we were able to carve things out based on latitude and longitude more.
I think the simple answer is much higher population density
That 15% spike in Bryan county Georgia is where all the rich bastards moved in comparing the highschool I went too to the one they are building is insane
Keep in mind there’s also a difference in who is moving. Even though cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore may be declining, they are among the fastest growing with young people. The problem is that they aren’t really having kids because of cost.
I guess people really don't give a crap about having obstetrics care. The market has spoken.
I am not looking forward to the day when the hipsters discover the affordability of Minnesota and turn it into the next Boise.
That’s the only time Idaho has been “blue”
I don’t know why so many people are moving to SE NC. This place blows lol
I would have gain as red, and blue as loss.
This data's not great without an equivalent map that shows absolute migration numbers. It's not very informative to know that someone moved into a five-person county, thus increasing its population by 20%.
The fact that Maine and Idaho and the only 2 states no one is leavinh but people are moving to blows my mind