That’s a good study – thanks for the link. But a couple of takeaways:
The number of permanent moves is only up less than 2% from the year before. A lot of the movers were listed as temporary.
It is not a new trend as suburbs and smaller cities have been gaining at the expense of the biggest cities for more than a decade.
It is possible for people to be leaving large cities AND leaving rural areas at the same time - if fact, this is occurring. People don’t want to necessarily live in the middle of nowhere. They will want some big-city amenities like restaurants/bars, shopping, music and sporting events, access to an airport, etc. Families still want top public schools and sports leagues for their kids. But they can find most of these amenities in the suburbs and, more recently, in smaller/mid-sized cities.
Big city downtowns are not really dying out, just some of the older neighborhoods. There is still a large amount of new housing construction underway in near downtown areas of many cities. Developers are not into throwing money away so there is still a lot of demand for rental units. Neighborhoods like South Park in LA, West Loop in Chicago, Rino in Denver, downtown Austin, etc. are all building a lot of new housing.
Finally, the biggest surprise to me was that the state with the largest net loss was not CA or NY, but FL! In fact, FL’s net loss was more than CA and NY combined. FL has long been a magnate for migrants from other parts of the country so are we seeing a reversal of that trend? AZ was also a net loser and NJ a net gainer.