The Numbers Don't Lie
Between 2020 and 2025, New York City lost roughly 400,000 residents. Chicago lost over 100,000. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland — all posting population declines that would have seemed unthinkable twenty years ago. Meanwhile, places like Bozeman, Montana; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; and Greenville, South Carolina are running out of housing stock.
This isn't random. This isn't demographic noise. This is a verdict.
People who can leave are leaving. The ones who stay are often the ones who can't go — locked in by subsidized housing, family ties, or jobs that don't transfer. And the cities, rather than asking what they did wrong, are increasingly asking the federal government to subsidize the consequences of their own policy choices.
What They're Running From
I moved my small healthcare consulting practice from Philadelphia to a mid-sized city in Tennessee in 2023. My overhead dropped by 40% in the first year. My employees — most of whom followed — are buying houses for what they were paying in annual rent. The regulatory compliance burden alone, which in Pennsylvania involved quarterly filings with three separate state agencies, collapsed to something a competent office manager could handle without a specialized attorney on retainer.
That's not a coincidence. That's the differential cost of government.
The cities that are bleeding population share a set of common features: high taxes, aggressive business regulation, dysfunctional permitting processes, deteriorating public safety, and school systems that have lost the confidence of the parents who use them. These aren't problems that descended from the sky. They are the direct output of specific policy decisions made by specific elected officials, most of them in power for decades.
San Francisco's commercial vacancy rate hit 37% in late 2024. Thirty-seven percent. That's not a pandemic hangover. That's a city that made it functionally impossible to run a small business — through taxes, through open drug use on commercial corridors, through organized retail theft that law enforcement was instructed not to pursue aggressively. The businesses left first. The people followed.
The Rural Destination Isn't an Accident Either
The places gaining population are not randomly distributed across the map. They cluster in states with lower tax burdens, less regulatory overhead, cheaper land, and — this part matters — a different relationship between citizens and their government.
In rural Montana or rural Tennessee or rural Idaho, the government is generally smaller, closer, and more accountable. You can show up to a county commission meeting and actually be heard. Zoning disputes get resolved in months, not years. If the sheriff isn't doing his job, the next election is your remedy — and people use it.
That's not nostalgia. That's functional governance at a human scale. And Americans who've spent years navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracies of major coastal metros are discovering, sometimes for the first time, what it feels like when government is a background feature of your life rather than its central obstacle.
There are real tradeoffs. Rural healthcare access is a genuine problem — one I know professionally. Broadband infrastructure is still spotty in many of the fastest-growing rural counties. And the cultural amenities that cities provide are real and valuable to the people who want them.
But the migration data suggests that for a growing share of Americans, those tradeoffs are worth making. The cities aren't losing people because rural life is suddenly more glamorous. They're losing people because city governance has become so costly, so burdensome, and so detached from the concerns of working families that the tradeoff calculation has reversed.
What Cities Won't Do
The honest policy response to this migration wave would be for major cities to look at what's different about the places gaining residents and ask whether any of it is replicable. Streamline permitting. Reduce the regulatory complexity that makes small business formation a nightmare. Take public safety seriously as a precondition for economic life, not a luxury to be balanced against other concerns.
But that's not what's happening. What's happening instead is a lot of grant applications to Washington, a lot of op-eds about how the people leaving just don't appreciate urban density, and a lot of policy proposals that would make the underlying problems worse.
New York City's response to its population loss has included proposals to tax remote workers who left during COVID, efforts to attract high-income residents with luxury development while simultaneously making that development more expensive through labor mandates, and a congestion pricing scheme that got implemented, suspended, challenged in court, and reimplemented in modified form over three years of administrative chaos.
The people leaving aren't the problem. They're the signal. And the cities that treat the signal as noise will keep losing people until there's no one left who can afford to go.
