Measuring the Urban Exodus

“With national population growth at a record low, domestic migration was the key component of population change on the state and local levels in 2021,” writes Riordan Frost, senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (JCHS).

Citing data first reported by JCHS in the “2022 State of the Nation’s Housing” report, published in June, Riordan describes migration patterns that tilt heavily toward the U.S. south, with the states of Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida each attracting more than 50,000 new residents during the pandemic. California, Illinois, and New York lost more than 50,000 residents.

Focusing on the county level, Riordan describes a pattern of “large urban counties losing domestic migrants and suburban areas around these counties gaining migrants.”

Another key finding reported in the article: a larger number of rural counties gaining residents in 2021 than in 2019.

The JCHS isn’t the only institution to report new migration numbers in recent weeks. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland also released a new data update for the second quarter of 2022 as part of its ongoing research [pdf] into the question of whether the pandemic caused an urban exodus. According to the Cleveland Fed, “migration flows were in fact very unfavorable for urban neighborhoods in 2020.”