More People Are Leaving Coastal Cities

Increasingly expensive coastal cities are bleeding both low-income workers and college-educated workers, according to an article by Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff, and Josh Katz in The New York Times. “This pattern, visible in an Upshot analysis of census microdata, is startling in retrospect. Major coastal metros have been hubs of the kind of educated workers coveted most by high-powered employers and economic development officials.”

Even before the pandemic, college-educated working-age adults were leaving cities like San Francisco and New York at higher rates every year. “A chart showing net domestic migration of college-educated working-age adults in the San Francisco metro area, going from an average annual gain of roughly 10,000 people before the pandemic to a loss of 25,000 people in 2021.”

Now, “affordability has broadly been eroding up the income spectrum in the country’s most expensive metros. As these regions have become richer, that has, among other things, helped fuel the rise in their housing prices.” The workers leaving these cities are migrating to other, less expensive but still thriving metro areas such as Phoenix, Atlanta, and Houston.

Read the source article for an in-depth analysis of domestic migration trends, the shifting needs and expectations of Americans, and the changes in smaller towns that have made them more attractive in recent years.