Accelerating an already existing pattern, more than 2 million people moved out of the largest urban counties in the United States in the last two years, primarily as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic, according to a new report.
That report, As Major Cities Struggle to Rebound, Remote Work Continues to Shift Population Growth, published by the Washington-based Economic Innovation Group, charts an exit of some 1.2 million people between the covid summer of 2020 and the following summer.
Another 860,000 people headed for the suburbs or countryside between July of 2021 and last July.
While smaller urban counties have somewhat bounced back since the worst of the exit in 2020, the report records that exurban and suburban counties saw the greatest growth in the last two years, adding 931,000 people in 2021 and 832,000 last year.
The urban exit is most dramatic when compared with trends over the last decade: in 2013 only 100,000 people had left the nation’s most urban counties, a pattern that gradually climbed to just over 450,000 the year before the Covid 19 outbreak.
A parallel trend supporting urban exit has been the emergence of remote work. In an earlier published report by the Economic Innovation Group, it was noted that the availability of remote work has been “an important driver of population loss in dense urban counties.”
Although the remote work effect has diminished somewhat in recent months, says the report, the fact that in the fall of 2021 “nearly four times as many people planned to move because of remote work as had moved already,” suggests that “the long-run impact is still unfolding.”
By Garry Boulard
