America’s Biggest Metros Lost Residents in First Full Year of Pandemic

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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.