No great migration occurred in pandemic
New figure s releas ed Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the proportion of people who moved over the past year fell to its lowest level in the 73 years that it has been tracked, in contradiction to popular anecdotes that people left cities en masse to escape COVID- 19 restrictions or in search of more bucolic lifestyles.
“Millennials living in New York City do not make up the world,” joked Thomas Cooke, a demographic con- sultant in Connecticut. “My millennial daughter’s friends living in Williamsburg, dozens of them came home. It felt like the world had suddenly moved, but in reality, this is not surprising at all.”
In 2021, more than 27 million people, or 8.4% of U.S. residents, reported having moved in the past year, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
By comparison, 9.3% of U.S. residents moved from 2019 to 2020. Three decades ago, that figure was 17%.
Besides giving rise to shel- ter-in-place restrictions, the
COVID-19 pandemic may have forced people to postpone life-cycle events such as marriages or having babies that often lead to moves. But the decline is part of a decadeslong migration decline in the U.S., said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.
“These numbers show a lot of people didn’t move or moved at a slower rate,” Frey said. “But it’s a longer-term trend.”
That’s not to say that nobody moved. The one uptick in mobility patterns last year took place in longer-distance moves, from state to state, compared to moves within a state or county. Those 4.3 million residents who moved to another state may have done so because of the pandemic, Frey said.
Demogra p hic expert Andrew Beveridge used change-of-address data to show that while people moved out of New York, particularly in well-heeled neighborhoods, at the height of the pandemic, those neighborhoods recouped their numbers just months later. Regarding the nation as a whole, Beveridge said he’s not surprised migration declined.