DC Lost >15,000 Net Residents to Out-Migration in First 6 Months of 2020

[Anonymous]

Sorry, OP.

The overall trend since the Industrial Revolution has been urban densification and rural desertification - more powerful forces are at work here than a mere pandemic.

[Anonymous]

In the broader context, US population growth as a whole is slowing. If some areas like the Sun Belt and Mountain West are booming, that means a lot of other more established areas have to contracting, which seems to be happening first in cities.

More demographics on who is moving would be interesting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/america-growth-slowing/2021/05/09/3a4b81ba-b032-11eb-ab4c-986555a1c511_story.html

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Like all mobs and conspiracy theorists, data and nuance isn’t relevant to the pro-density faction. They read something that tickled them in Vox, and ignore how it actually impacts a block.

You’re right, this should have been given more attention, and is being written off as “the pandemic”. Maybe. The risk of a dying city, and yes, any decline is dying (or dead) is enough that people shouldn’t be taking it for granted things will return to the way they were. Certainly not in 2, 5 and 10 year time frames.

DMV is the good scenario too. Other major metropolitan areas outside the sunbelt, except Boston, were in decline long before the pandemic. They also deny anyone is leaving, even when all of their friends and family are gone, or then become aggressive about it (good riddance, couldn’t hack it, it must be them, not me).

Talk about mobs and conspiracy theorists who don't find data and nuance relevant? Are you painting a self-portrait? Maybe this is the beginning of a negative trend or maybe it will be reversed within a year. Who knows? What I do know is that I receive something like five calls a day by some idiot wanting to buy my house which is not for sale, has not been for sale, and will not be for sale for the foreseeable future. I am not sure why these folks are putting so much effort into bugging me if DC is dying.

I mentioned students before and while I am not sure anyone has explicit data, with all the universities in DC I suspect students are a large portion of those who left. Moreover, DC has always had a lot of transitory families so knowing a few families that have moved is not really a big deal. Every year I know families that move but I actually know fewer from the past year. I am not sure why anyone would be dancing on DC's grave in these circumstances but it seems like a lot of wishful thinking.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like all mobs and conspiracy theorists, data and nuance isn’t relevant to the pro-density faction. They read something that tickled them in Vox, and ignore how it actually impacts a block.

You’re right, this should have been given more attention, and is being written off as “the pandemic”. Maybe. The risk of a dying city, and yes, any decline is dying (or dead) is enough that people shouldn’t be taking it for granted things will return to the way they were. Certainly not in 2, 5 and 10 year time frames.

DMV is the good scenario too. Other major metropolitan areas outside the sunbelt, except Boston, were in decline long before the pandemic. They also deny anyone is leaving, even when all of their friends and family are gone, or then become aggressive about it (good riddance, couldn’t hack it, it must be them, not me).

Talk about mobs and conspiracy theorists who don't find data and nuance relevant? Are you painting a self-portrait? Maybe this is the beginning of a negative trend or maybe it will be reversed within a year. Who knows? What I do know is that I receive something like five calls a day by some idiot wanting to buy my house which is not for sale, has not been for sale, and will not be for sale for the foreseeable future. I am not sure why these folks are putting so much effort into bugging me if DC is dying.

I mentioned students before and while I am not sure anyone has explicit data, with all the universities in DC I suspect students are a large portion of those who left. Moreover, DC has always had a lot of transitory families so knowing a few families that have moved is not really a big deal. Every year I know families that move but I actually know fewer from the past year. I am not sure why anyone would be dancing on DC's grave in these circumstances but it seems like a lot of wishful thinking.

I cannot speak for that PP, but I don’t think anyone is trying to dance on DCs grave. If there was going to be a post-Covid shift in population growth (which was already slowing) I would think that the city would maybe think differently about policy approaches. Clearly the demand right now for single family housing is through the roof everywhere in our region, including DC. Which comes to what I think the core point is, which is the question of what would DC do today if the city had to compete for people given current trends and would it do anything differently.

[Anonymous]

If you look at Census figures, you'll see that DC's population growth has been steadily shrinking for the past six or seven years. This is a long term trend that was obviously accelerated by the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal says the net number of people leaving DC in 2020 nearly doubled from the previous year. Probably a big reason is that the schools here have been closed for so incredibly long. We are a complete outlier nationally in our willingness to keep kids out of the classroom, and parents are responding to that by leaving.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Sorry, OP.

The overall trend since the Industrial Revolution has been urban densification and rural desertification - more powerful forces are at work here than a mere pandemic.

Tell that to Detroit.

[Anonymous]

The question that I suspect we don't know the answer to yet is how much of the change brought on in 2020 is going to be permanent. Are all jobs going to allow full remote work going forward indefinitely? If so, that obviously makes the prospect of leaving metropolitan areas more appealing for some people. But if you still have to haul into the office three or four (or five) days a week, being close to work could well seem as appealing in 2023 as it did in 2019.

It seems naive to assume that there won't be ANY long-term shakeout from last year, but it also seems naive to assume that all of the long-term trends that had been in place as of February 2020 are now suddenly over with completely.

Anyway, D.C. grew at twice the national average between 2010 and 2020 and at about three times the rate it grew between 2000 and 2010. If 15,000 or more people moved out in 2020, that still puts the population well above what it was 10 or 20 years ago. The city's population grew by more than 30,000 just in 2019, by which point the growth rate had fallen to about half what it was early in the decade, so it would take several years of pretty big population drops to reverse many of the recent changes in city's demographics and housing world.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:If you look at Census figures, you'll see that DC's population growth has been steadily shrinking for the past six or seven years. This is a long term trend that was obviously accelerated by the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal says the net number of people leaving DC in 2020 nearly doubled from the previous year. Probably a big reason is that the schools here have been closed for so incredibly long. We are a complete outlier nationally in our willingness to keep kids out of the classroom, and parents are responding to that by leaving.

Just to be clear, you are saying that DC wasn't growing as fast, but it was still growing, right? Without careful reading, it is easy to think you are saying that DC's population has been shrinking, which is simply not the case.

[Anonymous]

Similar data was brought to the DC Council’s attention with the plea that they require the Office of Planning to revalidate their wild pro-growth assumptions in light of the pandemi, before approving sweeping amendments to the DC comprehensive plan. But Bowser, her SmartGrowth minions and their contributors in the Big Development community jammed the changes through.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The question that I suspect we don't know the answer to yet is how much of the change brought on in 2020 is going to be permanent. Are all jobs going to allow full remote work going forward indefinitely? If so, that obviously makes the prospect of leaving metropolitan areas more appealing for some people. But if you still have to haul into the office three or four (or five) days a week, being close to work could well seem as appealing in 2023 as it did in 2019.

It seems naive to assume that there won't be ANY long-term shakeout from last year, but it also seems naive to assume that all of the long-term trends that had been in place as of February 2020 are now suddenly over with completely.

Anyway, D.C. grew at twice the national average between 2010 and 2020 and at about three times the rate it grew between 2000 and 2010. If 15,000 or more people moved out in 2020, that still puts the population well above what it was 10 or 20 years ago. The city's population grew by more than 30,000 just in 2019, by which point the growth rate had fallen to about half what it was early in the decade, so it would take several years of pretty big population drops to reverse many of the recent changes in city's demographics and housing world.

These are good points but it’s really important to understand the nature of DCs growth over the past decade and what may just be secular trends overall. This Brookings report provides good insight. It says that while DC total growth over the past decade was spectacular, the highest rates of growth were from 2010-2015, but from 2015-2020 growth slowed but picked up in the suburbs. This is primarily seen in the massive growth happening in NoVA and to a lesser extent in Maryland but mostly in Frederick and Howard counties.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/census-2020-data-release/

So over the past 5 years there was already a secular trend. What happened since COVID is that the trend accelerated very quickly. On a national level, this Bloomberg report shows that something more profound and universal is happening. A lot of people did move during the pandemic. And while people did not move far, it was unidirectional from urban areas to suburbs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-citylab-how-americans-moved/

There is a chance that all of this could be transient, but it isn’t looking that way based on these trends predating Covid. While DC will certainly return to positive population growth in 2021, the rate of growth is unlikely to be robust. Also, losing 15,000 people is not a small thing. Hopefully many of them return but for context, West Virgina lost about 35,0000 over the past decade. So it’s losing people is a big deal.

[Anonymous]

Seems pretty clear it's flight to the suburbs and exurbs. I have lived outside Annapolis since before the pandemic and boy am I getting a lot of new neighbors...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Similar data was brought to the DC Council’s attention with the plea that they require the Office of Planning to revalidate their wild pro-growth assumptions in light of the pandemi, before approving sweeping amendments to the DC comprehensive plan. But Bowser, her SmartGrowth minions and their contributors in the Big Development community jammed the changes through.

Their names are long forgotten but we are lucky that we’ve had a good number of civic leaders in the way back past that made good decisions in consideration of the common good. If we were to start again from scratch today, just think about how much land would get set aside for parks. Very, very little.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems pretty clear it's flight to the suburbs and exurbs. I have lived outside Annapolis since before the pandemic and boy am I getting a lot of new neighbors...

It’s looking like it. The key question is whether Gen Z (or enough of them) will also flock to big cities to make up the slack.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems pretty clear it's flight to the suburbs and exurbs. I have lived outside Annapolis since before the pandemic and boy am I getting a lot of new neighbors...

I think is truly a flight to the exurbs. This DC Policy Center report (which doesn’t have 2020 numbers) shows some pretty crazy trends. Fairfax surprisingly had large net out-migration. Montgomery county did too, but that’s not really any surprise. The surprise is the growth in a Stafford County. Loudon growth is pretty obvious for anyone that’s been to Leesburg recently. But Stafford was a surprise. I wish they had numbers for Frederick and Howard though.

https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/districts-population-grows-14th-year-row-weaker-rate/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Seems pretty clear it's flight to the suburbs and exurbs. I have lived outside Annapolis since before the pandemic and boy am I getting a lot of new neighbors...

I think is truly a flight to the exurbs. This DC Policy Center report (which doesn’t have 2020 numbers) shows some pretty crazy trends. Fairfax surprisingly had large net out-migration. Montgomery county did too, but that’s not really any surprise. The surprise is the growth in a Stafford County. Loudon growth is pretty obvious for anyone that’s been to Leesburg recently. But Stafford was a surprise. I wish they had numbers for Frederick and Howard though.

https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/districts-population-grows-14th-year-row-weaker-rate/

Out migration from Fairfax and Montgomery countries is driven by kids leaving for college.