Writing for J&S Transportation, Travis Van Slooten tries to understand why Americans have moved during the pandemic. To start with, though, we should probably think about why they have not:

A lot of attention has been focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected moving trends in the U.S. While some use terms like exodus when reporting about Americans who left the cities for the suburbs and smaller towns, others say these reports are an exaggeration.

For instance, William Frey of the nonprofit public policy organization Brookings Institution reports that “New Census Bureau data released this month [November 2021] shows that despite the attention given to COVID-related migration out of cities, college towns, and other pandemic-impacted areas, overall permanent migration levels in the U.S. plummeted to a historically low level during the first year of the pandemic.”

Upending your life is a stressful, risky thing during the best of times.  Who wants to be learning a new area (Where’s the pharmacy? Where’s the hospital?) during a pandemic?

The included map, however, shows that, as usual, Rhode Island was not a destination state.  J&S apparently ships people’s vehicles for them, and the only states in our entire region that saw an increase were New Hampshire and Maine.  To be sure, that particular measure might throw some confounding variables into the mix.  For example, people moving to a major city like New York may not have or not bring vehicles with them.

That said, the measure, here, is change from previous trends, and the story is familiar.  As people can live farther from work, they tend to head where Big Government can’t tell them what to do, and the pandemic has certainly added fuel to that fire:  Northeastern New England, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and so on.

The really interesting question is what happens next.  If I had to bet, I’d predict that, when people stop having the fear of illness-driven lockdowns as they’re trying to establish themselves in new areas, they’ll take the opportunity to move away from Big Government states at an even greater pace.  On the other hand, those heavy-lockdown areas have been suppressing their economies, so they may experience a larger-than-average rebound… unless they’ve done permanent damage to themselves, of course.

Featured image by Markus Spiskey on Unsplash.