
Covid-19 May Fuel Migration from High-Cost Cities, Analyst Says - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-11/covid-19-adds-fuel-to-great-migration-from-high-cost-cities
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_bxg1
I honestly think this would do great things for the country.

Politically, I believe a major factor in our divisiveness has been a lack of
cross-pollination with people who are different from us. People in the city
stay in the city, and people in the country stay in the country. It's much
easier to empathize with people in your "out-groups" when you know and
interact with some of them personally.

Economically, while urban centers have been exploding, rural America has been
rotting. There's no economic export bringing money to many areas. And without
that, entire towns sink into economic decay. Rural America was built on
manufacturing, because all it required was cheap land, and that's largely gone
now. Imagine a world where cheap land is once again the deciding factor that
draws economic activity, because high-income remote-workers are drawn to it
and have no other constraints. And then those people spend lots of money in
all those little economies.

Another aspect that's had a big impact on economic inequality is the growing
cost-of-living gap. It's really hard to move to the city and seek a way upward
in the world when you can't even hope to afford rent. Spreading out the white-
collar jobs geographically could spread out the opportunity economically.

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evgen
This is not going to change the rural/urban dynamic because people are not
going to migrate from high-cost cities to rural areas, they are going to
migrate from high-cost cities to slightly lower cost cities that still have an
acceptable level of culture/amenities/jobs. Techies and other over-educated
people are still going to spend almost all of their time interacting with
people of a similar education and socio-economic status.

People left rural America for a reason, and a slight deviation from the
coastal clustering is not going to change sufficiently to reverse the
inevitable hollowing-out of rural counties.

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_bxg1
There are lots and lots of professionals who would love to just live on some
land in a quiet corner of the country if it didn't mean giving up job
prospects. And yes, there are people who would stay in cities for the culture
and amenities. But I would guesstimate that the split on who would go where
given the choice is more like 50/50.

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1stranger
50% seems... high. I don't think the majority of people are looking to become
pioneers. Are the people who already work from home "live on some land"?

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dmode
Feel like I see a lot of bold predictions about post COVID life. My take on
all of these is that “I don’t know and nobody knows”. Dense cities have been
around for thousands of years and have gone through plague, pandemics,
terrorist attacks, and much more and have still thrived. I wouldn’t want to
make any predictions about post COVID life

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vharuck
This article is low on substance. They quote a generic "analyst" from
Susquehanna Financial Group, but never say why that company is worth listening
to. The details were in "a note published Monday." Published where? Was it a
company-wide memo, an email to clients, or a Post-It on the analyst's fridge?

Then the evidence for the claim: "As evidence, he pointed to data from real
estate companies that showed less interest in California, New York and New
Jersey as well as slowing searches for homes in larger cities."

No time frame. No numbers. No comparison to other markets Are many people
shopping for new homes at the start of a recession?

But, on the topic of whether this is going to reinforce a "great migration"
out of large cities, my wife phrased it best: after the pandemic scare is
done, people will want to go back to "normal life." It'll be just as easy to
not consider a pandemic in choosing where to live, even on the other side of a
pandemic.

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rayhendricks
Being able to purchase a house and land for 1/4 or less of a similar city
price is attractive, and having access to rural PUD-built fiber can be
attractive. But the sticking point would be the lack of rural school systems
for many looking to move.

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_bxg1
But along with those who move would come more tax dollars, which means better
schools. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg effect but the mechanism is there.
People without kids could very well "pave the path".

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so33
> As evidence, he pointed to data from real estate companies that showed less
> interest in California, New York and New Jersey as well as slowing searches
> for homes in larger cities

This isn’t good evidence for the argument. People who live in cities primarily
rent.

As an aside, I do think that a move to smaller cities will help strengthen the
American economy overall, similar to the distributed small-cities economy that
you see in Germany, where no one city has the primacy and pull of NYC.

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drewrv
> We’d be ‘short’ high-tax markets and ‘long’ low-tax markets over the long-
> term.”

This seems really silly. My wife and I are considering leaving the city we
love but tax rates have nothing to do with it. The reasons we want to live in
the city (public transit, activities, social lives) have evaporated overnight.
With no schools, no parks, and no office to commute into, there's an obvious
appeal to buying a bigger house with a big yard. But for a family that's
fortunate enough to be able to choose, the choice is about what kind of
lifestyle we want, not the delta in tax rates.

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angmarsbane
I hope it does. If just one partner in a couple can work remotely, it opens up
a lot more small cities / areas that the couple can live and work.

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uzakov
Great article and also I think this is very country specific. In the UK this
is already happening, many people who work in London commute from Slough and
Reading. House prices in Reading been increasing for quite a while
[https://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-
prices/reading/](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-prices/reading/)

