by Kevin Schofield

---

Through most of the late 2010s, we here in Seattle were told the city was going through an unprecedented population boom, fed in large part by furious hiring by tech companies. Then, many of us were surprised when the 2020 census results were published, which knocked tens of thousands off even the U.S. Census Bureau’s own estimates (the Census Bureau takes an official count every 10 years, then uses various methods in between to generate annual estimates of year-to-year growth). Was it the pandemic, or the high cost of living, or perhaps just “irrational exuberance” in how the estimations were done that fed a desired narrative of a booming Seattle? 

This weekend’s read is a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland that uses a new data source to uncover a bit more of what really happened to the population of Seattle and dozens of other urban areas in the United States since 2010. 

There are two major components to a city’s population growth (or decline): “natural growth,” the number of births minus the number of deaths; and “net migration,” the number of people moving in minus the number of people moving out. Since births and deaths are closely tracked, the statistics for those are accurate and well understood: Most urban areas have more births than deaths every year and thus a positive level of natural growth — though a level that is slowly decreasing as the U.S. population ages. But net migration is much harder to track, since there is no central government agency that tracks and publishes that data. But the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has for many years created a Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a random and anonymized sample of 10 million credit history records extracted from the database of the credit rating company Equifax. The CCP, which is updated quarterly, includes the census block where a consumer resides, which allows for tracking migration as people move from place to place.

There were a few things that were already known before researchers dug into recent migration patterns. We knew that many people in their 30s tend to move from urban to non-urban neighborhoods, often to raise families in environments perceived to be more family friendly. We also knew that in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, outflow from urban areas surged, though there has been less information available on the extent to which that trend has eased or even reversed as more people perceive that the COVID pandemic has eased. Similarly, international migration largely ground to a halt during the pandemic, but it seems to now be returning to normal levels.

The CCP data shows that since 2010, overall net migration has been negative from urban areas and has been slowly growing even more negative. 2020 saw a massive surge in negative new migration, but it seems to be reverting back to the pre-pandemic trend.

Seattle, however, has been an outlier in several ways. From 2010 through 2018, it saw positive net migration; it then suddenly plunged in 2018. It had just about recovered at the end of 2019 and early 2020 when the pandemic struck; Seattle then experienced the same dramatic exodus as most other urban areas. But since then, net migration has only recovered slightly and does not seem to show signs of returning to pre-pandemic trends. To be clear, this doesn’t mean Seattle is shrinking, because “natural growth” can compensate for some or all of the loss from net migration.

So why is this happening in Seattle? The report points to a couple of potential reasons. One clear one is that Seattle is one of several “high-cost” regions, where the cost of living — and particularly housing — can be prohibitively high. The report lists 12 metro areas with price-per-square-foot for residential real estate about $200; Seattle is fifth from the top at $299 (the Bay Area tops the list at $598; Indianapolis is at the bottom at $97).

The pandemic doubled the outflow from the high-cost metro areas; overall, it took two years for them to collectively return to the pre-pandemic trendline, and several of them, like Seattle, have not returned, including San Diego, Portland, and Sacramento. But even so, the long-term trendline for the high-cost metro areas has been increasingly negative, compared with affordable large metro areas, midsize metro areas, and small metro and rural areas.

In fact, digging deeper, we see that Seattle is only seeing positive net migration from other high-cost metro areas but steep out-migration to the other areas. Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Portland are seeing the same pattern. So our city is able to draw people from other high-cost areas, but is losing people to places with a lower cost of living or smaller cities and towns.

That also suggests that Seattle’s high proportion of white-collar jobs that can be done remotely (at least in part) may be exacerbating the net migration out of the city. However, that isn’t true of all cities with a high share of remote-work jobs; New York and San Francisco have seen their net migration return to the pre-pandemic trendlines.

The report suggests that the “new normal” for Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, and Phoenix might be thought of as “lingering damage” from the pandemic. It certainly does help us understand a bit more about what is happening here to know who is leaving and where they are going (and who is arriving, and where from). It doesn’t answer all of our questions, and it doesn’t predict the future population for Seattle, but it does appear that things have changed here, and it would be wishful thinking to believe they will eventually revert to the pre-pandemic boom times on their own.

Urban and Regional Migration Estimates: Will Your City Recover from the Pandemic?

---

📸 Featured image by SvetlanaSF/Shutterstock.com.

---