Counties overlapping Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York top the list of locales that have been losing population, while the biggest inflows of people have been to Arizona, Texas, and Florida, according to census data.
A Press Release by the United States Census Bureau revealed that the top county in terms of population loss was Los Angeles County, which lost 90,704 people over a one-year period from 2021 to 2022.
Elsewhere in California, Santa Clara County lost 15,650 people and Alameda County lost 14,840 residents.
Cook County Illinois, home to the city of Chicago, lost 68,314 people during the same period.
In New York, Queens County lost 50,112 people, Kings County lost 46,970 people, and Bronx County lost 41,143 people between 2021 and 2022.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 25: A view of a moving truck during the coronavirus pandemic on May 25, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York City. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
According to the Census Bureau, 68 percent of the largest counties in the United States experienced population gains.
The counties that had the largest inflows of new residents were Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, and Harris County, Texas, which has Houston as its county seat. Indeed, six of the ten counties that experienced the largest population gains were located in the Lone Star State, with Harris and five other counties experiencing an influx of 209,182 people in aggregate.
Other big winners in terms of population gain were located in the state of Florida. The Census Bureau reported the counties of Polk, Lee, and Montgomery together gained 92,848 people.
The Census Bureau noted that while a pandemic-era flight from big cities was a population boon to rural locales, this trend was more muted between 2021 and 2022. Instead, while some cities continued to lose residents, the major beneficiaries were different cities elsewhere in the country, particularly the south and west.
As Breitbart News noted, data from the Public Policy Institute of California suggested economic conditions, rising costs – particularly in housing – and the large homeless populations that roam some of California’s largest cities were major drivers of a population decline in the state, totaling roughly half a million people between 2020 and 2022.
Similarly, an Illinois Policy Institute analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) found that between 2019 and 2020 the average person leaving the state earned over $30,000 more than the average person moving to the state.
The analysis also revealed that besides the adjacent states of Indiana and Wisconsin, the main states residents were fleeing to were Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
The report cited jobs, housing, and tax policy as the major factors driving residents to other states.
Notably, neither Texas nor Florida levies a state income tax, and Arizona taxes personal income at roughly half the Illinois rate.
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You can follow Michael Foster on Twitter at @realmfoster.
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