The 2021 American Community Survey confirms that major population shifts took place due to the pandemic. But those shifts aren’t necessarily reflected by declines in housing prices in cities and regions that lost population. Indeed, prices rose almost everywhere, and usually faster than incomes.
Americans are moving out of big cities to smaller towns and the suburbs, but so far this hasn’t made big-city housing more affordable.
Numerically, the big loser between 2019 and 2021 was California, which saw the net departure of almost 275,000 people. That was just 0.7 percent of the state’s population, but the only state that lost a greater percentage was Mississippi. Other states that lost residents were Arizona, Louisiana, and West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia lost more than 25,000 people, or more than 5 percent of its population. Continue reading
