Yeahhh, maybe it’s like 60/40 corporations versus all other factors. 
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As a ford and toyota shareholder I support that. You can own a piece of all those sweet profits too!
“Over the last decade, and at an accelerating rate, urban counties have consistently lost people to suburbs, smaller towns and rural areas. But since 2017, international migration to urban counties started dropping even faster. Though international migration continues to add to urban growth, it added much less in 2020 than in 2017, offsetting less of the domestic outflow than in earlier years.”
WFH was the main reason my friends have fled…many get same or better pay now, with a dramatic reduction in COL and retirement preservation.
That’s looking at metro areas and not cities. For example, it lumps Gary, Indiana with Chicago. While the cities I noted gained population even from 2010 to 2020, certainly the outlying suburbs may not have. Especially the colder ones.
Same with suburban California. If you live in Bakersfield where the weather isn’t anywhere as nice as it is in bay area or LA, the high cost of living with few of the benefits seems much less worth it.
But I think this map of my state sums it up well. People just aren’t moving to rural areas. Suburban areas are certainly gaining quicker than cities but rural areas are hollowing out.
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Seems here in Cali, folks are state-hopping, and into rural/small towns. There’s also a phenomenon of tech workers wfh’ing in resort communities like Cabo, Hawaii, Puerto Rico,etc. so there’s a new sense of freedom insofar as job/home linkage. These numbers will of course take time to assess.
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You really want cities to be dying but the most recent census makes clear that cities are, at worst, largely standing still. The decline you are talking about is not happening in cities or suburbs.
Agreed. The question is how many people really have that flexibility (probably a growing number) and what the world looks like with endemic Covid versus pandemic Covid.
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