It's Not Just Blue Cities Americans Are Abandoning: Suburbs in Progressive Metros Losing Residents at a Rapid Pace
The continuing exodus of law-abiding citizens from the disintegrating capitals of wokeness has begun extending beyond the borders of those cities themselves.
With the growth of crime fostered and, in some ways, encouraged in progressive cities, coupled with the crippling taxes and cost of living, it was a no-brainer that many residents would move out of places such as Los Angeles and New York.
But recent data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that this migration has moved past the cities proper and bled into their suburbs.
According to the ERS, after reaching negative numbers from 2010 to 2016 and leveling off around zero from 2017 to early 2020, the rate of rural migration has increased inversely to the decline of migration into urban and metro areas.
The agency’s February report said the rate of rural migration jumped to 0.47 percent in 2020-2021, while the rate of migration into urban and metro areas dropped to 0.06 percent.
Net Migration Spurs Renewed Growth in Rural Areas of the United States
Learn more in this month’s Amber Waves: https://t.co/nq5eQc1tv0 pic.twitter.com/TxHxLYaYaC
— Economic Research Service (@USDA_ERS) February 23, 2024
This trend was by no means true across the board, with several of the poorer rural counties experiencing continued migration outward.
Overall, though, the data did speak to an interesting trend.
The ERS attributed the shift to the growing popularity of remote work since the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing more families and work-age adults to choose where to live based on overall quality of life rather than proximity to the workplace.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity said people are choosing to move out of metropolitan areas because of the policies implemented by Democratic politicians.
“The left has transformed our once-great cities into high taxes, anti-business, lousy public services, and soft-on-crime zones,” the organization said in a March 28 post. “Liberals blame this on racism — except now even the minorities are stampeding out.”
In an April 20 report, Newsweek said crime was the main factor for many citizens fleeing Democrat-run states and progressive cities, with the liberal California mecca of San Francisco County losing 7.1 percent of its population between April 2020 and July 2022.
The exodus is now including the suburbs as urban crime bleeds into metropolitan areas.
Granted, throughout the turmoil engulfing progressive cities ever since the pandemic, suburbs have generally been shielded from the worst of it, by their removal from the city centers.
Still, crime cannot be contained to a single geographic location forever, and even leaving crime to the side, residents of these progressive suburbs still felt much of the tax burden inherent to these progressive urban areas.
Of course people would start leaving.
Even if your area was relatively safer than the city, how much could you put up with paying ever-increasing, exorbitant taxes while your location becomes less and less safe every year?
This development was no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
Obviously, the combination of high taxes and high crime would be unattractive to most people.
The real wonder would be why it took them so long to leave in the first place.
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