The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t kill cities in the U.S., despite claims that the public health crisis would turn metropolitan areas into ghost towns. Urban spaces, for the most part, are rebounding and attracting newcomers.
Some Americans have lost interest in city life, but the reason many city populations haven’t fully rebounded isn’t due to a cultural shift rejecting city life, sociologists say. Instead, it’s the result of a practical response to an affordability crisis.
City populations have long ebbed and flowed. In the early aughts, for example, population growth in cities plummeted as easy credit and growth in metropolitan areas with large suburbs resulted in a “suburb boom,” according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
The reverse then occurred during the Great Recession of 2007, when the housing market collapse pushed suburban homeownership out of reach for many young people. As a result, young Americans who in an earlier decade would have opted to move out of big cities to start families and or purchase homes opted to stay put — adding to city growth rates.
And the pattern of mass exodus and return is playing out again. Major cities across the country experienced population loss during the COVID-19 pandemic — once people were able to move — as white-collar workers freed by remote work relocated to suburbs and smaller cities.
New York City lost about 631,100 people between April 2020 to mid-2023, according to the analysis of Census Bureau data by the Empire Center. Similarly, Chicago lost around 82,000 people— or 3 percent of its population — during that same period, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.
San Francisco lost more than 54,800 people, or 6.3 percent of its population, between 2020 and 2021, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data conducted by the Brookings Institution.
Midsized cities, though, varied in terms of population loss depending on the region.
While many medium-sized cities in the South like Nashville, Tenn. have seen their populations grow during the pandemic, some also experienced an exodus of their own. Meanwhile, places like Rochester, N.Y., lost 4,040 people — 1.9 percent of its population — between April 2020 and July 2023, according to the Rochester Beacon.
Many Americans who left major cities chose to relocate farther away from metropolitan centers, according to the Census Bureau. Researchers found that Americans weren’t just moving to protect themselves and their loved ones from the virus, but because city life had lost some of its appeal.
In 2018, about 1 in 4 U.S. adults said they preferred living in a city, according to data from the Pew Research Center. A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, Pew researchers found that American attitudes toward living in a city had changed, with fewer adults, about 1 in 5, expressing a preference for living in a city.
Meanwhile, Pew also found that the share of American adults who would rather live in a suburb than a city had increased from 42 percent in 2018 to 46 percent in 2021. The preference for living in rural areas was essentially unchanged.
But many cities that suffered losses during the pandemic are rebounding. A recent analysis from the Brookings Institution found that most of the country’s big cities, those with at least 250,000 people, are “doing much better” demographically than they were during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The analysis looked specifically at the population growth in 91 of the country’s largest cities. It found that 31 cities saw a population decline from 2022-23 — a sizeable decline from the 56 big cities that suffered population losses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Out of those 91 cities, two-thirds experienced population improvements that same year either through population gains, fewer losses or a shift from losses to gains compared to 2020-21.
Some of the cities that gained more people than they lost in 2022-23 were Minneapolis, Detroit, San Francisco and Boston, according to the analysis.
Part of the population gains for some of these cities is linked to increased immigration to the U.S. during the past two years, according to William H. Frey, author of the analysis.
Cities will always attract the young
Cities are places of social opportunity because of their size and the availability of shared spaces where people meet and mingle, according to sociologist Eric Klinenberg, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.
And this social opportunity is attractive to young people looking to make friends and is especially appealing to unpartnered young people looking for love.
“They offer more opportunities for chance encounters,” Klinenberg said. Even in an age where online dating is common, the idea of meeting people in person is still strong enough to draw people to cities, he added.
Frey stressed that cities are also attractive to young people for the economic and educational opportunities they offer. Cities can count on newcomers among the annual wave of 18-year-olds set on leaving their childhood homes and exploring the world at large, he added.
“There’s always a new generation of young people leaving their parents’ homes and heading to college,” Frey said.
Young people are also often drawn to the cultural amenities cities have to offer, like museums, theater, restaurants, and music venues, both experts said.
Cities are increasingly becoming more attractive to older adults
Population growth is not limited to 20-somethings. Some older Americans are increasingly being drawn to city life, said Klinenberg and Japonica Brown-Saracino, a sociology professor at Boston University. And they’re attracted by proximity to high-quality hospitals and clinics.
Cities are also more walkable than suburbs or rural areas, which could be attractive to older adults whose health doesn’t permit them to travel far. Plus, cities typically have better public transportation, which allows for independence, according to Brown-Saracino.
The same cultural amenities in cities that are attractive to young people are also enticing to older people who might have more free time and disposable income to spend.
People in search of community are drawn to cities
Brown-Saracino and Klinenberg told The Hill cities are also attractive to people who are sexual, racial, ethnic or religious minorities in the broader United States.
Migrants have historically flocked to American cities for economic opportunities; over time, that has increased chance of encountering more people from their home country, according to Klinenberg.
And connection to a community in a new country helps increase the odds of survival.
Cities also offer a level of anonymity that rural or suburban communities do not, Brown-Saracino said, and this can make it easier for people who are deemed outsiders to find supportive communities.
“Because of their density and anonymity, especially big cities, have long been refuges and supportive places for people outside of purported social norms like sexual and gender minorities,” said Brown-Saracino.
Americans with young families don’t seem to be returning to cities
Those who don’t seem to be so interested in returning to city life, in some parts of the country, are Americans with young families. They’re turned off, in part, by quality of life and cost concerns.
Large urban areas are losing families with young children faster than they are losing population overall, according to a 2023 analysis from the Economic Innovation Group. In some of the largest urban areas like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, the population of young children is more 10 percent smaller than it was in April 2020.
In fact, the only parts of the country that appear to have an increasing number of young families are “exurban” communities, or places outside of suburbs.
“While the steep national decline in the number of young children has pushed the under-five population down in most types of counties, exurban counties are the only type to have experienced net growth since 2020,” the analysis reads.
For example, Maricopa, Casa Grande, Ely and Coolidge are four exurbs that sit about 40 miles outside of Phoenix, Ariz and accounted for a third of the metro area’s population growth last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But the exodus of young families from urban areas — large and small — is happening more in the mid-Atlantic and on the West Coast, according to the Economic Innovation Group analysis. These families appear to be flocking to urban counties in the Southeast, if they move to an urban area at all.
Many who want to live in cities can’t afford to anymore
Many Americans who left big sized or small cities, especially a few in the Sun Belt.
Brown-Saracino knows dozens of people who left the pricey Boston area for areas like Providence, R.I., or Portland, Maine, which offered many of the same cultural amenities and social opportunities but where the housing prices were lower.
So, what she has observed is not a rejection of urbanism but more of a rejection of very expensive urbanism.
Since 2019, housing prices have climbed across the U.S. by 54 percent; in the past year, prices have increased by 5.8 percent, according to a Washington Post analysis.
In New York City, for example, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now $4,300 ,and in Boston, it’s $2,800, according to Zumper. Given that the average weekly salary in both states in 2022 was roughly $1,600, rent eats up a huge portion of income.
Washington, D.C., is also suffering from high rents, with the average monthly rent for a one-bed room apartment now running $2,300, according to Zumper. The average weekly wage in the D.C. area is bit higher at $2,191, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“There are plenty of people who still have the dream of moving to New York or San Francisco but that may be out of reach for them,” said Brown-Saracino.
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