The Definitive Measure on the Urban Myth of the Urban Exodus

We’ve all heard the reasons to believe in the Great Urban Exodus of 2020. People escaping the coronavirus. Telework letting people go anywhere, and so they did. The civil unrest after the death of George Floyd sparked a flight to safety. And the images of long lines waiting to bid above asking price for a suburban bungalow  made it easy to believe.

But the data now shows that what we saw and what we believed are only half the story, and without the other half, we don’t know the story at all.

Stephan D. Whitaker, a policy economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, has published the most thorough, convincing and illuminating

In the charts above, the red line indicates the beginning of the George Floyd protests. While the protests varied by city in violence and duration, Whitaker found that in these six cities with extensive protests, “the most recent net out-migration estimates are more than twice as high as the average during the preceding three years.”