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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 New York Times recently published this interesting piece about Culdesac and the completely car-free community that they are building just east of Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona (a place that is not generally known for its walkability). Culdesac calls itself the first "post-car real estate developer in the United States." And so their Culdesac Tempe project has been designed to house 1,000 residents and exactly 0 cars.
When the first phase is completed next year, residents will be restricted from having a car within the community and they'll also be restricted from parking on any nearby streets. (This second stipulation was done to assuage concerns that a zero parking community would create a spillover effect in the surrounding area.) Instead, residents of Culdesac Tempe will rely on their local amenities, as well as on transit (it's on a light rail line), biking, ride-sharing, and other forms of urban mobility.
While this may seem kind of crazy for sprawling Arizona, the company's thesis is both clear and clever. The future of American cities needs to be the kind of walkable urbanism that you find in places like the northeast. But at the same time, the fastest growing cities in the United States are generally in the Sun Belt. What they are doing is building walkable urbanism in the places where people clearly want to live.
According to newly released US census data for 2010-2017 – which Brookings analyzed here – the “back to the city” movement appears to have peaked in 2012. (This is something that we’ve looked at before on the blog.)
Here is a graph from Brookings showing the annual growth rate for urban and suburban counties. Note how growth in the “urban core” peaked in 2012 and how growth in both the “emerging suburb” and “exurb” have increased since then.
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 New York Times recently published this interesting piece about Culdesac and the completely car-free community that they are building just east of Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona (a place that is not generally known for its walkability). Culdesac calls itself the first "post-car real estate developer in the United States." And so their Culdesac Tempe project has been designed to house 1,000 residents and exactly 0 cars.
When the first phase is completed next year, residents will be restricted from having a car within the community and they'll also be restricted from parking on any nearby streets. (This second stipulation was done to assuage concerns that a zero parking community would create a spillover effect in the surrounding area.) Instead, residents of Culdesac Tempe will rely on their local amenities, as well as on transit (it's on a light rail line), biking, ride-sharing, and other forms of urban mobility.
While this may seem kind of crazy for sprawling Arizona, the company's thesis is both clear and clever. The future of American cities needs to be the kind of walkable urbanism that you find in places like the northeast. But at the same time, the fastest growing cities in the United States are generally in the Sun Belt. What they are doing is building walkable urbanism in the places where people clearly want to live.
According to newly released US census data for 2010-2017 – which Brookings analyzed here – the “back to the city” movement appears to have peaked in 2012. (This is something that we’ve looked at before on the blog.)
Here is a graph from Brookings showing the annual growth rate for urban and suburban counties. Note how growth in the “urban core” peaked in 2012 and how growth in both the “emerging suburb” and “exurb” have increased since then.
The other finings from Brookings are that growth has slowed in large metropolitan areas (small metro areas and non metro areas, on the other hand are up) and that people are continuing to move from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.
If you look at population gains and losses from 2016-2017 for the 100 largest US metro areas, the only Snow Belt gainers within the top 20 are New York (15th), Columbus (19th), and Boston (20th). Dallas, a Sun Belt city, was first with a gain of 146,000 people.
So what’s going on? The narrative is that soon as the US economy and housing market recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, the trend lines simply reverted back to business as usual: sun and sprawl.
The other finings from Brookings are that growth has slowed in large metropolitan areas (small metro areas and non metro areas, on the other hand are up) and that people are continuing to move from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.
If you look at population gains and losses from 2016-2017 for the 100 largest US metro areas, the only Snow Belt gainers within the top 20 are New York (15th), Columbus (19th), and Boston (20th). Dallas, a Sun Belt city, was first with a gain of 146,000 people.
So what’s going on? The narrative is that soon as the US economy and housing market recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, the trend lines simply reverted back to business as usual: sun and sprawl.
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