Americans fled cities in waves during the pandemic, right? Not to so fast.
Writing for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, Riordan Frost presents the latest change-of-address data from the United States Postal Service to shed a little more light on one of the dominant narratives of the pandemic: that Americans moved en masse away from cities during the pandemic.
According to Frost, "change-of-address requests submitted to the US Postal Service (USPS) indicate that while an unusually large number of people did move early in the pandemic and again in late 2020, there has not been a significant change from prior years in the total number of moves since the pandemic began."
"The data, moreover, show notable increases in the number of individuals who moved but decreases in the number of families that moved," adds Frost.
The amount of moving during the pandemic is even compared to a low bar: "the share of Americans moving each year has been falling for several decades," notes Frost.
A lot more detail on the methodology and findings of this data analysis are available in the source article below.
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