Big City Populations Fell in 2021

The populations of many big cities declined in 2021 according to data recently released by the Census Bureau. The new data are for counties and metropolitan areas (which are simply the sums of various counties), and not necessarily for cities. But many cities, including Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle, are closely identified with single counties, so those counties can be compared with surrounding counties to see what is going on.

People are leaving the cities.

I may cover this in more detail in a future policy brief, but for now I want to ask a single question: did people move out of cities in 2020 because of taxes and housing prices, as one article claims, or because of COVID?

If taxes and housing prices are driving people out, then all major urban counties in expensive states such as California should have declined while major urban counties in low-cost states such as Texas should have increased. If COVID is the issue — that is, if people have decided to take advantage of telecommuting by moving to more suburban or exurban areas — then even central-city counties in low-cost states probably declined while some urban counties in expensive states increased.

A look at the data for California counties reveals that Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and Santa Clara (home of San Jose) counties all lost population. So did all of the counties immediately surrounding San Francisco: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo, as did two of the counties closest to Los Angeles: Orange and Ventura. But Riverside and San Bernardino counties, just east of Los Angeles, both grew, as did Yuba County, which is next to Sacramento, and Merced, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus counties, which are within a long commute distance of San Francisco.

Housing prices are lower in these counties than in the central-city counties, but are still very high by U.S. standards. Taxes are also high. This suggests that taxes and housing costs aren’t the main issue.

What about low-cost states? Fulton County, Georgia (home of Atlanta), lost population, while many (though not all) of the counties surrounding it gained. Dallas County, Texas, declined while all of the counties surrounding it gained. Harris County (Houston) also declined, while all of the counties surrounding it gained.

Based on these examples, I suspect that the pandemic was more responsible for the 2021 shift than taxes and housing prices. Though the latter play a role in California, they are much less important in Georgia or Texas, yet central cities in both states lost population to their suburbs.

Although this can’t be proven with the census data, I also suspect that people aren’t leaving big cities because of fear of COVID. I think they wanted to leave, and COVID gave them the opportunity to do so. As I’ve pointed out before, a 2018 Gallup survey found that 40 percent of the people living in big cities wanted to move to the suburbs or exurbs, while fewer people lived in suburbs and exurbs than wanted to do so. Now no longer tied to the cities with five-day-a-week office jobs, many people are moving to less densely populated areas.

The Census Bureau has not yet reported 2020 or 2021 data for one geographic unit: urban areas. While metropolitan areas are simply combinations of counties, and thus many include substantial acres of rural lands, urban areas consist entirely of the urbanized portions of those counties. The Census Bureau redefines them with every decennial census, so we may get 2020 data for those areas soon. If the Census Bureau ever publishes 2021 population data for urban areas, they are likely to be based on the 2010 definitions, but still may give some clues about people’s location preferences.

Data from seven or so metropolitan areas are not really enough to absolutely prove anything, so I will try to do a more detailed analysis in the next few weeks. But for now, it appears that people are fleeing density at least as much as they are fleeing high taxes and housing prices.