What we really know about the Covid American movements

Despite rumors of an urban exodus, few people moved at the height of the pandemic, but in some cities the story is a little different.

Despite rumors of an urban exodus, few people moved at the height of the pandemic, but in some cities the story is a little different.

Yes, other people leave San Francisco, but guess where many of them go. Seattle!

Yes, other people leave San Francisco, but guess where many of them go. Seattle!

Other people in the US? But it’s not the first time Do they migrate the coronavirus crisis with other tactics than they had before the pandemic?Are you moving to the suburbs?These are popular questions without definitive answers, for now, but some emerging knowledge would possibly paint a broader picture of Americans’ geographical reaction to the pandemic.

One thing is certain: so far, there have been few dramatic claims that other people are fleeing cities in general. In fact, having knowledge implies that, in general, fewer people have moved from the beginning of house orders to June – even with growing interest again.

Of those who have moved, it is not known how many of these movements will be only temporary, but that does not mean that there are no attractive immigration problems to follow. Some decided cities, adding New York and San Francisco, seem to have more emigration than most, but guess where many of those other people go?Other very giant metropolitan areas, such as Seattle and Los Angeles, here’s what we know so far.

While there is a belief that the pandemic has led to mass migration, the data does not support it. According to figures from two domestic moving companies, Americans moved the pandemic less than they normally would, no more.

These decreases were not distributed lightly in all states: data from the Hire A Helper mobile corporate platform found that movements declined less in states without house orders, such as Nebraska (where they even increased slightly, to 1. 8%). But overall, almost every state saw declines, ranging from 1. 3 percent in Arizona to 66. 1 percent in New Hampshire.

 

United Van Lines, which focuses on long-distance travel, also reports fewer trips due to the pandemic. But both corporations see that interest begins to recover enthusiastically during the summer months. In June, United Van Lines said interest in the measure was 14% higher than last month, after several months of slowdown.

There are caveats in those figures, of course: they only show trends among other people who have used engines, and those who move in particular, but space sales and department searches have also shown similar trends.

Existing home sales fell in 2020: in June, they were a 11. 3% drop in the same month last year, but it’s still an increase since May, which is the lowest month of sales since October 2010 and in July, sales hit. an all-time record.

It is not yet known what these increases will mean compared to historical lows. It is imaginable that these recent sales and movements constitute the repressed call of others who did not move or buy at the height of the pandemic. “It’s not uncommon for [summer] to be the high moving season,” said Igor Popov, apartment list’s leading economist, who also saw record decreases in apartment searches before resuming this summer. “I think it was a little more intense this summer, due to the nature of the pandemic and the nature of the shelters on site before the months of maximum mobility.

It is also imaginable that movements will continue to accumulate for the rest of the year. What we know so far: a massive migration has not yet occurred.

Several surveys have shown that the vast majority of other people who moved in the early months of the pandemic did so for reasons not similar to coronavirus In a survey of 1300 other people conducted through Hire A Helper, only 15% reported that they moved because of Covid -19. De those pandemic-induced migrations , 37% of respondents said they moved because they may simply not have a home due to a loss of income similar to Covid. 33% of respondents said they moved to a shelter with friends or family and 24% said they didn’t feel safe where they were.

A Survey by the Pew Research Center in June examined Americans who said they had taken pandemic-induced measures more closely and found that, in general, other young people between the age of 18 and 29 were moving because of covid-19 in greater numbers, either permanently or temporarily (the closure of a school for in-person education may be the only culprit , at least in part). Only 3% of respondents said they had moved out due to Covid-19, and 6% said more had moved in with them. that’s why.

As for the popular claim that other people are “running away” from urban spaces, several recent analyses have addressed this factor head-on. The findings of Apartment List and genuine real estate aggregator Zillow: There is no widespread movement of others looking to leave urban spaces for less dense environments.

A detailed Zillow report released in mid-August found that the percentage of assets seeking traffic in suburban spaces fell from last year. Apartment List discovered similar effects in a July report. Nationally, he even found that the proportion of other people looking to move to a higher-density city was higher by just over a percentage point, concluding that “knowledge shows sophisticated regional changes, but no overwhelming evidence of large-scale urban exodus. “

“I think there’s definitely a socioeconomic pocket that would possibly be making those moves and it’s the one that will make those moves,” Popov said of Apartment List. ‘But when it comes to the total rental market, when you look at the bird’s eye data, there’s no such leak that other people necessarily participate in.

A vital warning: both platforms considered the need for suburban spaces as opposed to urban spaces that are based on housing location, not real travel. But if history is an indication, predictions of a massive urban exodus are unlikely to come true. As many researchers have pointed out, cities have recovered and thrived beyond disease outbreaks. The 1918 Spanish flu episode in New York City had a mortality rate of 452, consisting of 100,000 New Yorkers. However, as city scholar Richard Florida wrote in CityLab, “In the decades that have framed this pandemic, spanning the 1910s and 1930s, New York’s giant population has grown from 4. 8 million to 6. 9 million. Array” In 1849, more than 10,000 Londoners died of cholera in three months. A year later, a chimney decimats the city. But “the role of this city as the world’s leading monetary medium at the time expanded after its fatal cholera epidemics,” Florida writes.

None of this means that population patterns have been replaced in the afterlife and will be replaced now. Take a closer look at specific geographic spaces for a more complex image.

In some of the largest, densest, and highest coastal cities in the United States, namely San Francisco and Manhattan, several parameters recommend that population migration patterns have changed.

According to Hire a Helper’s knowledge of their own clients, 80% more people asked to leave their homes in San Francisco and New York than to move between mid-March and the end of June. United Van Lines also discovered more movements of these Two Cities than last year According to his knowledge, between May and August 2020, programs to move from New York to any top destination by 45% and in San Francisco by 23% compared to the same time last year.

But what is equally appealing about these knowledge sets is where the other people who left went: among those who applied for long distance through United Van Lines, the company found that the main destinations for others leaving those cities were other primary metropolitan areas. .

The most sensitive areas on the destination list for others who left San Francisco between May and August 2020 were the Seattle, Austin, and Chicago metropolitan areas (for the context, the same era in 2019, the most sensitive destinations for others leaving San Francisco). were New York, Seattle and Boston).

New Yorkers were most likely to move to the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tampa between May and August 2020. Last year, in the same period, their top destinations were Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.

It’s vital to be clear: we won’t have to infer from those discoveries that there are crowds of New Yorkers migrating west to Los Angeles, or that Seattle is the new San Francisco (although any of the migration patterns were trends that occurred even before the pandemic). . ) In fact, those ten most sensitive destinations still account for only 25% of moves outside those cities, and we still don’t have a full understanding of where they all went.

What this knowledge recommends is that it may not be cities that are wasting other people because of the pandemic; on the contrary, these movements extend significantly across the city and region, and in many cases drive trends that were already in position before the pandemic. .

“We’re seeing a lot of variation in the city,” said Rob Warnock, a studio associate at Apartment List. “I think that’s where verbal exchange about urban exodus deserves to be: in this discussion about local markets and whether other people are interested in staying or leaving their local market, that a massive national dispersion of cities. “

The same applies to moves to those metropolitan areas.

“In many subways, what we see, and it’s early in the days we see this, is that there are indications of superior demand for more remote and cheaper suburbs, unlike the central subway city where”I’ve noticed expansion of tasks,” said Susan Wachter, professor of genuine real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania. “This is what happened before Covid,” he said, referring to population expansion rates in the suburbs and suburbs that have accelerated over several years.

“We see a lot of variation at the city level. I think this is where the verbal exchange of urban migration deserves to be. “

In San Francisco, Apartment List found that the proportion of users looking to move to a high school near the city had higher levels by 9% compared to prepandemic levels. In a press release published in August through Zumper, the true real real estate aggregator discovered that hires are increasing and declining widely in the metropolitan area. In the city of San Francisco, rental costs fell by 11% year-on-year. Neighborhoods that spasp a giant share of generation workers, such as Menlo Park, Santa Clara and Milpitas, saw costs fall by 16%. By contrast, hiring costs in Daly City increased by 8%, and at Livermore, on the outside. Bay, rental costs are more than 14%.

Many generation corporations in the Bay Area have announced some of the ultimate liberal policies of remote paintings that allow painters to paint from home until at least 2021, or indefinitely (Twitter and Slack), making it easier to relocate a company whose rents and real estate costs have soared. The fact that similar trends continue or spread elsewhere may include a component of other remote painting policies and trends, says Arpit Gupta, assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“In my opinion, a big question is: how much will secondary/tertiary cities earn just for the suburbs of big cities?” Gupta wrote in an email to CityLab. It depends a lot, I think, on how the house painting criteria are established. “

The types of towns Gupta speaks of may simply be residential towns on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, such as Livermore, but they are also places like Cleveland, Ohio or Tulsa, Oklahoma, where attracting remote personnel is noted as a prospective resilience strategy.

Working from home, like many other points that facilitate travel, is a luxury that many Americans do not have, in fact, many of the models captured in this knowledge are sessed in favor of other people with means: those who can rent. corporate moves or buy a home. People who can move out, period.

In Manhattan, where new listings have fallen by 56% year-on-year from the start of the pandemic to August, the luxury real estate market appears to be the top hit. For homes over $4 million, sales fell by 67%, according to UrbanDigs, a genuine real estate knowledge site.

Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate exceeded five% for the first time in August since real estate corporation Douglas Elliman began registering it 14 years ago. Knowledge research through the New York Times can capture where some of these vacancies come from. The Times between March and May 1 revealed that the richest zip codes were emptying in Manhattan at the height of the pandemic, likely including a large number of academics and others with moment houses or family homes to move to, in many cases temporarily. .

As with much of the rest of the pandemic, this wealth and racial inequality can emerge as a dominant narrative of migration patterns. If existing trends continue, inequality can also be geographical. But overall, Wachter doesn’t expect to see anything like the city’s death. “Cities have had the strength to attract and will continue to have this strength to generate task growth,” he said. “And therefore, in the long run, I hope there will be a recovery. “

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