Between 2020 and 2021, so right when the pandemic hit, Manhattan alone lost $16 billion of federally-taxable income, according to this recent study by Economic Innovation Group. And San Francisco saw net migration that reduced its federal income tax base by more than $8 billion. At the time, this represented about a 20% decline.

Now, I don't know to what extent this maybe changed, slowed, or reversed from 2021 to today, but the IRS tax data is pretty clear: the pandemic accelerated a longstanding trend of Americans moving out of older coastal cities toward newer, sunnier, and more sprawling cities in the sun belt and in the Mountain West region.

Here is a map from EIG showing the difference in incomes between households moving in and moving out of each US county. A dark blue county means that the people who moved in were richer than the people who left. (For an interactive version, click through to their website.)

To give two examples. Here is San Francisco County, which lost nearly 20,000 people with average incomes of around $240,000 per year.

And here is Summit County, Utah (home of Parkview Mountain House in the Mountain West region), which saw 81 new tax returns and an average newcomer income of $395,000 per year.

This is an important reminder that people -- especially people of means -- vote with their feet. If they stop liking a place, they will leave, along with their incomes, to somewhere else. Indeed, in the case of this IRS data, the income flows to these growth regions seem to have been largely driven by upper-income households.

The Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University recently published this overview of the “socioeconomic factors affecting demand for housing in Chicago.”

Here is the change in population in the City of Chicago from 1950 to 2016:

And here is a comparison between Chicago and the five biggest cities in the US. Note the “sun and sprawl” phenomenon. Also note that the list below is for city proper boundaries.

One particularly interesting set of stats is the decline of children (population under the age of 18) in the city:

Since 2010, the city has lost over 40,000 children and teenagers. 

But, if you break it down by neighborhood market type, it is the low-cost and moderate-cost neighborhoods that lost the population. The high-cost neighborhoods were up.

The study posits that the old trend of moving to the suburbs after you have kids may not be for everyone – provided, of course, that you have the means. And it goes beyond Chicago. DC is predicting a 25% increase in K-12 students within the District.

For the rest of the charts, click here.

Last week the US Census Bureau released its 2017 population estimates for the largest cities in the country. All of the figures are for the city itself and not the broader MSA or some other boundary.

Here are the top 15 cities with the largest numeric increases between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017:

However, if we switch over to percentage increases, Frisco, Texas – which is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area – jumps up to number one with an increase of 8.2%. 

In fact, the top 3 cities (on percentage basis) are in Texas and 10 of the top 15 cities are located in the South. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to many of you. Related post: Follow the sun and sprawl.

However, if we only consider the 25 largest cities in the US, the fastest growing city on a percentage basis was Seattle at 2.47%. Number two was Fort Worth at 2.18%. And number three was Charlotte at 1.84%.

New York City sits at 0.08%. And Detroit lost people. But it’s not a horrible figure (-0.35%). For more tables and data, click here.