This story is being republished under a special NJ News Commons content-sharing agreement related to COVID-19 coverage. Link to FULL story: pressofatlanticcity.com/news/national/americas-biggest-metros-lost-residents-in-1st-full-year-of-pandemic/article_8c8768e8-974e-53b8-b71b-3c8f2c79aa64.html
After returning to metro San Francisco following a college football career, Anthony Giusti felt like his hometown was passing him by. The high cost of living, driven by a constantly transforming tech industry, ensured that even with two jobs he would never save enough money to buy a house. So he started looking elsewhere, settling on Houston just last year.
“In Houston, I can be a blue-collar entrepreneur. With the Houston housing market, it made sense to come here,” said Giusti, who started a house-painting business.
Giusti was one of tens of thousands of residents who vacated some of the nation’s biggest, most densely-populated and costly metropolitan areas in favor of Sunbelt destinations during the first full year of the pandemic, from mid-2020 to mid-2021, according to new data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The pandemic intensified population trends of migration to the South and West, as well as a slowdown in growth in the biggest cities in the U.S.
PHILADELPHIA: Greater Philadelphia lost more than 13,000 residents. Around three-quarters of the loss came from people leaving, and the rest was caused by deaths outnumbering births. The metro area had 6.2 million residents.
