The small cities and suburbs of the Midwest are lucky.
In recent decades, domestic migration to the belt has slowed down – and the Midwest becomes the new place to be.
In the middle of the 20th century, a large number of Americans exchanged cooler and more expensive places in the North – also known as snow belt – for soft winters and cheaper houses across the south and southwest, also called the sun belt. When the pandemic struck, the widespread adoption of remote work prompted a new wave of Americans to move to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Carolines and other states through the Sunbend.
But the peak linked to the cocvid in South transplants masks a longer term inverse trend. In recent decades, moves to the belt of the sun have slowed considerably. And more recently, some Midwest and Northeast states have lost fewer people than pre-countryic, and some have even acquired the population. Rural areas in particular have seen an increase in movers, creating a tendency to migrate the belt of the snow belt.
Just before the pandemic, the Missouri and the Wisconsin underwent clear population losses, but now they are developing, a new document from the center for Harvard housing studies has found. Illinois, Ohio and Michigan have seen their post-countryic outings. In the northeast, Connecticut has also seen slow external migration.
Two economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, Sylvain Leduc, and Daniel Wilson, also reported last year that the country’s hottest places have seen their growth in slow population while the coldest places increased. They maintain that when temperatures increase with climate change, this trend seems to be there to stay.
“The” pivot “in the American climatic-migration correlation in the past 50 years should continue, leading to a reversal of the snow belt on the 20th century snow belt to the motif of the solar belt migration,” they wrote.
It is not completely clear why we see this new trend of the belt of sun belt, but the cost of living and climate change could be factors, the researchers wrote.
Housing costs have increased in a large part of the Sun and South belt, especially in recent years, helping to slow down southern migration, Business Insider Riordan Frost, research analyst at Harvard and author of the newspaper told Business.
“Not only in typically super cost states, was a problem, but it becomes more and more a problem in the sun belt,” said Frost.
At the same time, a large part of the snow belt, in particular more rural areas, has remained relatively affordable. The north also experiences less icy winters, while the sun belt is becoming more and more bankrupt, which makes the snow belt more and more attractive.
“These new migration trends should help alleviate the effects of climate change, as fewer people are directly exposed to the negative impacts of extreme and more frequent extreme heat days,” wrote Leduc and Wilson.
In zooming, it is important to note that many Americans remain on site. In the United States, household mobility has dropped since its peak in the 1980s, from a rate of 18% in 1986 to 9.7% in 2019. The pandemic briefly disrupted this trend, but in the past two years, moving rates have continued their decline trajectory before 20120.
And a large part of the problem is high accommodation costs. Many cannot afford to move due to high mortgage rates, house prices and rents. Others fear losing the low interest real estate loans they obtained when interest rates have dropped in the first months of the pandemic.
“In general, the owner’s mobility rate has really plunged, and this leads to the overall mobility rate,” said Frost.
Have you moved to the Midwest – or on the left? Contact this journalist at erelman@businessinsider.com.
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