Americans Begin Returning to Cities After Remote-Work Exodus, Data Shows - Slash...

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post:

The exodus of people fleeing large urban areas during the height of the pandemic appears to be reversing, according to data from the Census Bureau released Thursday. Many workers who could telecommute abandoned crowded cities and counties for suburban or rural areas when covid struck, causing demographers and businesses to wonder whether the movement signified a permanent shift. But the overall patterns of population change are moving toward pre-pandemic rates, the bureau's Vintage 2022 estimates of population and components of change show.

Eleven of the 15 largest metro areas gained residents or lost fewer people compared with the previous year, including the D.C. metro area, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution senior demographer William Frey.... Among the most striking recorded shifts were in Manhattan and San Francisco, both of which lost population at a significant rate between 2020 and 2021. Manhattan, which shrank by 5.87 percent in 2021, grew by 1.11 percent last year. San Francisco lost 6.79 percent of its population in 2021 but shrank by only a third of a percentage point last year. Both are home to a large number of people who were able to work remotely during the pandemic. Covid rates in New York City were especially high early in the pandemic, and many Manhattan residents moved to outlying counties....

"Many counties with large universities saw their populations fully rebound this year as students returned," said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau's population division.
The article also makes the point that immigration into America was temporarily restricted during the pandemic, so outflows never had a chance to be counterbalanced by inflows. And the exodus to the suburbs may have already peaked. Last year Manhattan gained 17,472 people, the article points out, while counties outside the city lost residents. The Census Bureau notes that was a pattern for 2022: "the smallest counties nationally, those with populations below 10,000, experienced more population loss (60.8%) than gains (38.3%); while the largest counties, having populations at or greater than 100,000, largely experienced population increases (68%)."

Beyond that, the executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute argues that it's just too soon to know whether the pandemic-era outflow from cities was permanent. "We've just been through a major health and economic shock. There's been what I call a doomsday narrative about what's going to happen, with predictions of empty downtowns and city centers that wither and die." They believe the new census data "should give us pause in terms of declaring that we've arrived at a new normal. It's highly likely that some of the folks who left will come back, and we really don't know if it's going to be a lot of them or just a small portion."