Migration trends in U.S. metro areas | Hacker News Reader

Migration trends in U.S. metro areas

bloomberg.com

78 pointsJerry2104 comments

This article is light on details but I think this is as close as it comes to telling us why:

"Soaring home prices and high local taxes are pushing local residents out and scaring off potential movers from other parts of the country."

It would make sense that as other parts of the country build out their attraction for talent, that talent is being syphoned away from high cost areas to lower cost areas with similar benefits but higher satisfaction, be it housing affordability, access to education, return on tax investment, etc.

In other words, once tech becomes mainstream outside the tech hotbeds, these surging regions will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, [primary] education, etc., if they can now make a good living in other areas too.

> will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, education

I don't think it's obvious that some of these areas will be able to provide the same quality education.

Those three main metros listed are not known to have great school districts [they do have a few great [primary] schools which do well, but are the exception].

It’s not about the quality of education. The educational institutes post date the industry cluster. Paris was a centre of fashion before fashion was studied in universities, ditto Nee York. Los Angeles was the place for movies in the states for three or four decades before film schools existed. New York was the home of American finance long before commerce or finance were more university centred than apprenticeship, if that’s even true now.

Agglomeration economies of expertise lead to large, deep labour markets. I doubt California is much behind Boston in biotech research but the industry is all in the BosWash corridor, mostly near Boston.

Not Cal as a whole, but SSF is second only to Boston in biotech holding roughly 80% of Cal bioscience tech cos.

"once tech becomes mainstream outside the tech hotbeds"

I've been hearing that this is coming, in one form or another, for basically all my entire life. Whether it was "telecommuting", or distributed teams, or off-shoring, etc.

“once tech becomes mainstream outside the tech hotbeds”

Precisely the opposite is happening. In the 1970s and 1980s there were huge numbers of computer programming jobs in places like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas and Wisconsin. These were attached to the USA’s vast industrial base. As the USA lost its factories, it also lost these programming jobs. As manufacturers sent more and more jobs overseas, these computer programming jobs also went overseas. Tech jobs did not begin their current pattern of concentration until the 1990s. The current situation, where so many of the jobs are in California or New York, is a new situation which is still taking shape.

Boise is a prime example of political refugees running to a place because they love the current policies. And then voting in people who enacted the types of policies that they ran away from. The district I live in went completely Democrat for the first time in its history.

It’s also making house unaffordable. My small 1100 sq ft house has appreciated almost 60% in 4 years. I couldn’t afford to move into something bigger even if I wanted to.

Oh and traffic that’s getting fun because our city planners are about 10 years behind on city planning.

But it’s still better then San Francisco or LA. And our crime rate is still super low...For now.

Are you sure they run there because they love the current policies? Do you know that they didn’t move there in spite of the current policies? The housing policy that is causing a lot of distortion in California was enacted decades ago. The people migrating to Boise aren’t old folks are they? People younger than 50 didn’t have much to do with the famous property tax proposition in California.

Most of them are under 45 I would say. Most I talk to are coming here running from either California’s political policies(guns, taxes) or Portland because it got to weird and crime is to high. We have some of the lowest metro crime rates in the US. So that’s a big draw to.

But Boise is definitely moving blue. Which is what’s cause the rub between the people who have lived here and those moving in. Even though a lot of people see Idaho as a backwards messed up state(and trust me it is in a lot of ways). The people who have been here outside of the last 5 years when it has exploded are pretty resentful of the growth.

For all of these issues it’s still a wonderful place to live. But that might change in the next 10 years.

Is it moving blue or have the GOP just moved deeper (crazy) red?

Maybe “blue” really means they’re more left-libertarian and don’t feel the GOP is a sane choice?

Maybe this is a form of NIMBYism? If the issue is primarily housing prices, then it seems the new homeowners start benefiting from the policies they previously suffered from as renters, so it's not hypocrisy, but rather a change of circumstance.

Also, it can be difficult to isolate the will of voters per-issue, given the limited number of representatives on the ballot.

> And then voting in people who enacted the types of policies that they ran away from

And thanks to the population moving to places like Austin, it looks like Texas is going the same way. A lot of people moved to Texas to get away from what they considered to be overly liberal/Democrat policies, only to find that the liberal/Democrats moving to cities like Austin are going to outvote the rest of the state.

It's basically a purple state now. Cruz did win, but barely.

> Boise is a prime example of political refugees running to a place because they love the current policies.

No, it's not; the people fleeing to Idaho for political reasons aren't going to Boise, the people going to Boise largely aren't doing it for political reasons.

> And then voting in people who enacted the types of policies that they ran away from.

That's pretty solid evidence that they aren't running away from the policies.

> The district I live in went completely Democrat for the first time in its history.

That's happened a lot of places recently, and has little to do with migration.

> It’s also making house unaffordable.

What's making housing unaffordable for people not participating in the boom is the inpouring of money chasing housing and the fact that the real housing market—everywhere, not just in Boise—has friction, creating supply limits in the short run that don't represent long-run capacity.

Any place with career opportunities means exorbitant housing costs and other taxes. Regardless of your politics, there’s a real wealth disparity, and increased demand is only driving up costs.

I don’t know what the solution is, but the first step is acknowledging the problem.

Taxes 20% higher wouldn't matter so much if your rent isn't 5000% higher than in other states.

It's housing costs that are strangling these cities.

Okay housing prices are crazy, but 5000% is a bit of a stretch even between the cheapest city's median 1br and the most expensive city's median 1br. I'd say closer to 900-1200%.

The problem is compounded by this: while there's a lot of upward mobility in certain industry careers in these cities, the normal-person jobs have roughly the same returns as anywhere else in the country. But the housing doesn't have that kind of distribution, it's heavily skewed to be commensurate with the particularly high income folk.

It's still a staggering amount compared to any marginal increase in tax.

There’s no engineering reason hosing in these areas can’t grow as fast as jobs. Tokyo’s population has tripled over the last twenty years while rent has been pretty much flat.

Seattle has produced way more hosing lately and house prices have crashed. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/why-are-se...

> Tokyo’s population has tripled over the last twenty years

No, it hasn't? Tokyo's already an anomaly in shrinking Japan by staying roughly the same size, and last I checked it was also forecast to start losing people around 2020.

http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...

You’re right. I’m wrong. Tokyo has grown by 3m people in the last 20 years. It has not tripled. It’s increased by ~10%.

Building in cities is difficult partly due to the way zoning laws work in the US. Established zones also have residents that have political clout, which encourages sprawling into uncontroversial areas.

https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoni...?

>Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, the three areas with a triple-digit daily exodus

Yet those cities showed continuous rise in housing costs over the same period. Example: LA housing costs rose roughly 7% in the period it lost roughly 100,000 residents

> Honolulu, San Jose, New York and Bridgeport, CT lost the highest shares of their residents to other parts of the country.

Yet San Jose housing costs have risen 16% in the last year.

And I note even Flint Michigan has had a 9% cost increase over the last year.

What could possibly explain this?

Land speculation, majority low income people leaving, interest rate adjustments

Relatedly, families with children being replaced by young professionals.

Imagine a lower middle class family of five, two working parents and three kids, in a 3-bedroom place. They get priced out and are replaced by three upper middle class engineers with no kids, sharing an apartment.

The population loss is the domestic portion. There is a much larger population gain from international migration inwards (in general, this past year that wasn't the case in places like the Bay Area, but overall).

Also, the composition of the domestic migration. In general, lower income workers move out to other states (these are more in number), and higher income workers move in from other states. Not the best article, but here is a recent one: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-census-mig...

The scariest thing about Texas growth to me is the insane sprawl that seems to go unchecked in the state. Massive roads lined with gas stations, chain restaurants and big box stores, surrounded by cheaply built homes with four cars in the driveway/garage, just everywhere. It makes me want to leave the country.

That sounds amazing, I might want to move.

Why does it bother you how other people want to live? Not everyone wants to live in an Arcology. If you want to, then go for it but let other people live as they want.

Objectively speaking, sprawl is about as inefficient as urban design gets.

It makes it nearly impossible to have walkable area around which smaller and more organic experiences can develop. It also makes o very hard to develop any kind of community.

Then there are the economic implications sprawl. It makes the city instantly dependant on cars and roads for everything. Things such as school transportation, policing and emergency response also become more expensive, as fewer people inhabit the region per mile.

It is like buying a pickup truck for everyday commutes. Sure, you can do it if you like it. But objectively speaking it is rather inefficient.

Are you in Europe or something? Just about every city in the United States is surrounded by single family homes and freeways with the same chain stores repeated every few miles. It's really hard to not find what you're looking for.

It isn’t. Your footprint becomes much smaller once you get out of your car. There are walkable/bikable areas all over the place that are livable, but they may not stand out if one isn’t looking for them.

Maintaining the roads and infrastructure associated with sprawl places a huge financial burden on cities that often can’t be supported by local taxes alone, not to mention the cost to individuals. Look at how much American consumer debt is tied up in cars. Definitely unMAGA. It also wastes a huge amount of land and isolates people as they move from work to home to their various other destinations, always sequestered away from others. Nothing is human sized, it’s car sized. People are welcome to live how they want, but they should also have to shoulder the cost of the negative externalities associated with their lifestyle. Of course, NIMBYism also often prevents denser development. It’s a vicious cycle. Here’s a screenshot from a video I took in Queens the other day - https://imgur.com/a/iShA4yV. No bike lane on this street, surrounded by pedestrians and in a walkable community (Kew Garden), yet, even in dense NYC, we’re prioritizing making enough room for this giant truck over humans. All these hardworking tax payers in Kew (who don’t drive) supporting the storage of this private property over the improvemt of their community. It seems quite backward to me.

Title is misleading--the article only discusses metro areas. I'm interested in seeing the stats within city limits.

Census data, which might form a part of the data used for this article, typically includes a proper superset of the city limit.

e.g., for NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#Met...

Ok, we've replaced that title with more representative language from the article.

Arguably LA, Chicago and NYC are fairly saturated metro areas already, and for them to be experiencing outmigration is a desirable safety valve. What's not being shown here is whether there's an actual net population loss in these regions. If there is, I suspect it's minimal.

This is insane. Any of these cities could fit 25m within city limits if they just upzoned. Shanghai has 25m and half the municipality is farmland or two or three story buildings.

It would require more than just upzoning to increase the population of a city to 25m. NYC's subway, for example, would need significant improvements to support that kind of population.

The tax base grows with population growth. The advantages of subways and other mass transit are strongest with denser populations.

This is false for Chicago, which had a million (!) more people in the 1950s than it has today.

Vast swaths of the south side are vacant, and residents of homes in abandoned blocks can famously buy plots of land for a dollar (plus taxes).

"fleeing" is quite emotional, but given that this excludes natural growth, I don't see what's surprising or bad here. Crowded places need a constant flow of people leaving to avoid overcrowding. What do the numbers look like when births are included?

I suspect you’ll see more of this as legacy public sector structures force taxes to go up in these cities. Texas is great. Low cost housing, low taxes, good schools. You can be a regular person in these cities and buy a house with a pool in a decent school district.

And very low cost to oppressing minorities too :)

Blacks in Texas do better in school then in Wisconsin. https://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-b...

I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of blacks in the Midwest are Jim Crow refugees and thus haven't had as much time to develop community support systems and generational wealth.

Also, Texas is very diverse.

Hispanic students also do better in Texas than pretty much everywhere else in the country.

Not for long. Most of transplants are form CA.

I'm a Bay Area resident but visited Austin for the first time over the weekend. It's an amazing city, but the locals were openly unhappy about any more Californians moving there. Seems like there's already a big ex-CA population.

Longtime Austin resident, frequent Bay Area visitor here..

Yes, the problem we run into with people from California is that they move here and immediately start trying to create similar policies they left.

It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that banned Uber & Lyft, have raised property taxes to the legal maximum every year, pushed for a state income tax, and many other things.

My property taxes are 1/2 of my mortgage payment now and only going higher. While I can adjust and make due, it's pushing out more and more of the people who make Austin great.

Is there anywhere in the US with a baseline property tax credit? Its not something I have looked into thoroughly but it seems so backwards that states aren't giving everyone 400 square feet worth of exemption from property tax. If the tax rates are exponential enough it would do a lot to help fix the housing crisis to pressure people into fully occupying their homes, punishing those who use them as investments, and incentivizing owning your living spaces.

Sort of. Texas has a homestead exemption which allows you to exclude a portion of the value of your home from having property tax applied. It caps out at $25k unless you're over 65. While that works for many rural parts of the state, it's almost irrelevant for much of Austin.

Ref: https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/property-tax/exemptions/...

CA does this, but only for about $70 of property taxes a year for homeowners.

Longer time Austin resident living in CA now. Property taxes in Texas are a function of your low-service State govt policies rolling costs down to the counties.

I know three families not in Travis county who left TX this year because their valuations and tax rates have soared. It wasn’t the left that did it to them.

Enjoy it while you can without Prop 13.

> It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that banned Uber & Lyft

When were Uber and Lyft banned? I recall when they left because they did not want to comply with driver fingerprinting requirements, but don't recall any ban.

Also, Uber and Lyft began and are headquartered in literally the most leftist city in the country, San Francisco. The notion that "leftists" don't want Lyft or Uber seems odd.

"The left" is a broad group with many different ideologies. I don't think ride share companies that flaunting regulations to even be a left vs right issue. It's more entrenched encumbent/rule of law vs anti-regulation/technocracy which doesn't fall into any neat categories.

San Francisco has attracted many sects of contrarians over the years. It is like a leftist museum.

While leftists have all kinds of diverging attitudes, there definitely is a large population who don't want Lyft or Uber -- especially Uber. When companies reach a certain scale, no matter how liberal they are, there are large portions of the left that push to see them taxed or hemmed in somehow, because deep in the leftist world view is a sense that something unfair has happened. Part of this is due to the contrarian ethic, that rejects playing by society's rules; and part of it is due to communism's lasting influence. Entrepreneurs enjoy only tenuous legitimacy, and inevitably lose it when their company proves to be just like all the others.

While fingerprinting was the public claim, the City also demanded ride level trip data. That one didn't get the same coverage. Of course, it came out later the City wants to regulate all online transactions including Craiglist, Airbnb, and even Tinder. I still don't understand that last one.

I wrote about this in great detail quite a while ago and quoted Mayor Adler: https://medium.com/@CaseySoftware/mayor-steve-adler-is-scamm...

> similar policies they left

> raised property taxes

California property taxes are super low thanks to Proposition 13 (which ironically makes housing less affordable because low tax coastal housing attracts investors like crazy).

So higher property taxes are not what made California unaffordable, if anything it's the opposite.

The people leaving California likely didn't luck into the prop 13 handout and are mad as hell about it which would explain why they are voting for higher property taxes.

Personally, after living here for a decade, I've seen how much damage that stupid law has done to our public services and housing market and wish for nothing more than Copenhagen-style land taxation applied across the state.

Yeah, land value taxes are loved by economists. But opposed by voters because the voters own land. shrug

Only 1/2 your mortgage payment?

In Williamson County I was paying 3.1% of assessed value several years ago.

With a 4% mortgage rate fixed for 30 years, it would only be a matter of time before the house would appreciate roughly 30% and then then 3.1% property tax rate applied to the higher value would be more than the mortgage interest.

Hasn't Austin always been the liberal bastion of Texas, an island in a red sea? It seems odd to blame newcomers.

Californians knew that experience clear back in the 1980s.

A popular bumper sticker read, "WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA. NOW, GO HOME."

All of those apply to Washington too.

Not too long ago Washington had the tongue in cheek "No Californians Allowed" (also Portland[1]) signs telling how they disliked the impact on housing prices.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/03/go-back-to-california...

I saw them in Seattle, but can't find an image.

This does not seem to account for retirement. I bet that most of the people moving to Phoenix, for example, are retirees. Why would you want to retire in the snow in NY? Plus, the taxes in NY are much more than in Phoenix or Florida.

Do you expect an upsurge in retirement? Otherwise it should be a pretty steady rate, year-to-year, no, unless major companies with major layoffs favoring seniors happened in those regions this year...

Yes, the population is aging and retirees are a rapidly-growing segment.

The boomer generation is retiring now, no?

Yes, but they all didn't grow up in three main regions, nor during a narrow time window. In other words, if this were solely due to retirement, I'd expect to see a more gradual increase and in more places.

Considering that NYC, Chicago, and LA are the three biggest cities in the country, I would say, yes, quite a few of them grew up in these regions. If anything, boomers would be the only generation that could afford living comfortably in said regions.

Yeah but parent said "now", and I would not expect a big jump. You may be including retiring "now" + already retired [who no longer want to or can afford those places and also are moving].

Yeah, to be clear, I don't think this is the only contributor - I'd imagine taxes and cost of living definitely have an impact, among others. I do think some of these factors might work in concert too though - it's not difficult to envision people entering retirement, who own their abode in gentrifying areas and have seen property values (and taxes) go up, deciding to sell and see that money go further in a lower-cost-of-living area.

It'd be useful to study the pairwise origin and destination of the domestic moves. That would lend insight into whether the gains posted by Sunbelt metros are largely of the rural-to-urban nature (or small metro to large metro, but still nearby), or whether most domestic arrivals are coming from places further away, from other regions of the country.

After all, the former kind is the usual urban concentration we've seen for a while, while the latter might be indicative of broader demographic trends like the Great Northward Migration, or the first Sunbelt Boom.

A couple of things are unclear from the article (for NYC specifically, and, more generally):

1. Does NYC still lose people after accounting for the effects of international migrant inflows?

2. What are the education levels of the people leaving the city?

3. Are they referring to the city only, or the metro area (which, IIRC, can stretch into Westchester and parts of Jersey)?

For NYC, it appears the city is growing when considering international migration (subject to various caveats about quality of data). More detailed information can be found here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was engineered to do this.

Punish blue state earners with higher taxes. These folks flee into red states and hopefully bring some jobs with them.

Punish in this context means reduce the amount of state taxes they can deduct from federal taxes - in effect increasing their tax rate. Isn't it predominantly "blue" people asking for more taxes for more social programs? Sounds like they got what they were asking for..

They want other people to pay increased taxes.

Most federal social programs are spent in red states.

Most poor people live in red States. This is effectively pointing out that our government spending is progressive.

That may be true in percentage terms, but it definitely appears not to be true in the absolute terms that would predict spending. States with households below the poverty line are, as you'd expect, dominated by the most populous states, which tend to be blue states.

Blue person here. I would be asking for the social programs, things like, educating children, to get more money.

For me to have to PAY more money, but for those social programs to get less money, is not at all what I would be after, no.

This is such an obvious distinction that it would lead me to assume you are not arguing in good faith. If that is not correct I would appreciate your expounding on your views more so I understand you.

You are paying more money than you did before, but because of a deduction cap not an increase in tax rate. You still have the same gross tax bill from state and federal, but you can no longer deduct the entirety of those state taxes from your federal taxes. The same amount of money is going to the social programs in your state through those taxes, and at the same time there is more money going to federal taxes. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say these social programs are getting less money.

He’s claiming that high taxes are not an end for people like him, they are a means to an end. If the end is not achieved via the means then the means are undesirable. If I had to hypothesize I might venture to say that were the President to pass a bill raising taxes progressively on the most wealthy while keeping spending on social programs the same, he would oppose it.

As a third party, I’d say I find this to be the highest likelihood interpretation of what he told you and so by far.

I’m an advocate for higher taxes; particularly on people of means. I’m opposed to a form of taxation that punishes someone based on the state they are living in. For instance, I’d be opposed to an increased tax on just wealthy residents of Mississippi. I’m on the fence about whether or not I favor the particular tax change under discussion but one shouln’t have the attitude that you have regarding it. You should come up with a better reason for supporting it. If you can’t then you should be opposed to it.

Pray tell, what social programs did they get for this? The tax bill was barely paid for.

Not to mention that affluent blue states already pay more net to the federal government than they get back in services.

This is the one I'm most excited about https://eig.org/opportunityzones

Describing a tax incentive for private capital as a "social program" stretches the bounds of credulity.

Furthermore, speaking as a resident of one of the designated "opportunity zones", it's already full of luxury condo developments.

Some argue that allowing residents of high tax states to deduct more from their federal taxes is in effect a subsidy to high tax states. Why should someone who lives in Washington or Texas (no state income tax) have to pay more in federal taxes than if he lived in California (highest state income taxes in the USA)? This never seemed equitable to me.

>Sounds like they got what they were asking for..

Where are the social programs then?

lol in this case it's more money going out of state to fund things like the military. So... not really.

If you're poor in a blue state, the local tax cap isn't going to affect you. It's just another form of progressive taxation.

It may be that more rich people live in blue states, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a political punishment for blue states... at least not anymore so than the income tax brackets are a punishment.

Here are some states that are particularly hit by this change: Iowa (5th highest state income taxes), Minnesota (4th), Wisconsin (10th). Illinois has the 4th highest total local taxes. Are those the blue states you're referring to?

I think it could have been structured in a better/different way.. but there's no need to turn this into some kind of political witchhunt. The US tax system has been a system of progressive taxation for a very long time.

This is silly, it’s been well established even by voters that this is punitive.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/politics/t...

Unsurprisingly, democrats flipped all but 1 seat in NJ by aggressively messaging the tax bill. The voters see it for what it is.

The 3rd chart on that page clearly shows this is a progressive tax increase, nearly entirely falling on those households making over $200k per year.

Again, it may be that more rich people live in blue states, but that does not make it punitive.

You could get the same graphic shown at the top for ANY tax increase. This article amounts to a general argument against any form of progressive taxation.

Is that why they decided to end a deduction instead of just doing an across the board percentage hike (or even both)? Again, even if you don't think so the people affected have gotten the message.

The article talks about multi-year trends. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was introduced in November 2017 and became law in December.

At most, you can claim the law accelerated an existing trend but without 2018 data, you're just making things up.

This article https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2018/07/06/milli... connects most of the emigration to Prop 30 and Prop 55, but it's kinda hard to take it at the face value with "an estimated 138 high-income individuals" and no context on total number of high-income individuals or the tax bill they would've responsible for had they stayed.

Major increase in standard deduction should've left most income earners in those states flat (or better), and affect only upper echelons of earners.

I benefitted significantly having always lived in states with significant local taxes.

And I never understood why those taxes should be deduced from my federal taxes.

>Punish blue state earners with higher taxes. These folks flee into red states and hopefully bring some jobs with them.

Of course, that's hoping they don't bring their politics.

I also have a hard time believing that the Act was actually engineered to combat market concentration, rather than that being a happy side-effect of punishing people perceived as likely to vote Democratic.

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