If Austin is the New Austin, San Jose is the New St. Louis
This week the New York Times published the results of US Postal Service data about where people did and didn’t move in 2020. Here were the most important points:
30 million change-of-address requests to the U.S. Postal Service in 2020. Note: not everyone who moves files a change of address, particularly young adults.
Areas that were already attracting new residents kept attracting them. Those that were losing migrants lost more. In other words, Austin is the new Austin.
Sun Belt metros have continued to draw new residents, while those in upstate New York and the Midwest have not.
Some of the biggest losers in 2020 were New York, San Jose, Seattle and Boston
The biggest winners were suburbs of New York and Cape Cod
The piece’s overall tone was: Nothing to see here. I would disagree.
Yes, there were migration trends that started in 2018 that have continued through 2020. But 2020 will be a turning point of migration, much the same way that 1950 was. In 1950, many Rust Belt cities — Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland — reached their peak populations and have never regained them. I live in Philadelphia where the city has never recovered its 1950 peak population of 2 million people, and still hovers around 1.5 million people — a fairly astounding loss of 500,000 people over 50 years. And yet — New York City lost 400,000 at least temporarily during 2020 when people relocated.
In Philadelphia, this population loss and sense of decline was defining aspect of the city until 2006 when the city’s population finally started to increase again. Long sustained periods of people moving out of cities like those “biggest losers” threatens everything — from investor confidence, to revenue to support the city’s infrastructure, to the city’s long-term reputation. People will always want to live in New York, but it may not be as many people as want to leave.
It sounds crazy to think that some of our biggest and best-performing cities of the last few decades could be in for a long period of sustained decline — as a native New Yorker, I personally hope that isn’t the case. But imagine that for 50 years from 1870 to 1920, St. Louis was the country’s fourth-largest city; by 1950 its population peaked at roughly 850,000 residents, but it had already fallen to eighth place. Today it has just 300,000 people in its city limits. St. Louis was an icon of a particular kind of manufacturing and trade that slowly declined in the second half of the 20th century, but it was also a kind of city built before automobile infrastructure that was also going out of vogue. It’s possible that the kind of global, in-person lifestyle that made San Jose and New York so desirable the past 50 years is on its way out too.
Austin may be the new Austin, but San Jose might also be the new St. Louis.