Cities/states that will grow/shrink the fastest post-COVID

[vdeane]

Speaking as someone from the Albany area, there are differences in how seriously different areas of NY have taken the pandemic.  They just aren't as stark as between different areas of the country.  Wegmans downstate?  The entrance/exit are both one-way and the premium baked goods are gone (or, in the case of the Harrison store, never existed at all, since it just opened in August).  Wegmans upsate?  Aside from people wearing masks, hand sanitizer and things to clean the cart at the entrance, and plexiglass at the registers, there's noting to indicate there's even a pandemic (or at least there wasn't back in September).  Meanwhile, all the grocery stores here have one-way aisles.  Over in Buffalo, people only wear masks indoors, regardless of distancing.  That's not the case here in Albany.

FYI, it looks like Rochester just overtook Buffalo for worst outbreak in the state.  That trendline on the NY Times map is just scary.  And the number of cases per day is basically double what it was last week (the issue with cases is true for Albany County too... they're staying we might skip the yellow zone and go straight to orange, though for overall infection rate we seem to lag Monroe County by a couple weeks for some reason).

As for housing, Rochester was booming even last year, so it's not just the pandemic.  In Albany, there has been a noticeable amount of people moving here from NYC.  If one wants to leave NYC but stay in the state, upstate is a good option.  If you want to stay in the Wegmans area, you'd need Rochester/Buffalo/Syracuse over the Capital District.

[webny99]

Speaking as someone from the Albany area, there are differences in how seriously different areas of NY have taken the pandemic.  They just aren't as stark as between different areas of the country.

Right, I didn't mean to imply we were NYC without the COVID cases. It's certainly another level in NYC itself, but we're a lot more comparable than other places just by virtue of being in the same state.

As for housing, Rochester was booming even last year, so it's not just the pandemic.  In Albany, there has been a noticeable amount of people moving here from NYC.

Sure, prices were on the rise last year in what's normally one of the flattest markets in the country... but this year has been next level: https://13wham.com/news/local/rochesters-housing-market-hotter-than-ever-median-sales-prices-soar

If one wants to leave NYC but stay in the state, upstate is a good option.

... the only option, in fact (unless you count Montauk)!

[CNGL-Leudimin]

A trend is already being seen in Spain, in which people are fleeing the cities and going back to rural areas. Many towns and villages have seen their permanent populations increased. The deployment of broadband Internet connection to these areas has helped (even though it is still far from reaching everywhere). I hope this trend doesn't reverse once the coronavirus is gone.

[kphoger]

If one wants to leave NYC but stay in the state, upstate is a good option.

... the only option, in fact (unless you count Montauk)!

But kalvado says Albany is somewhere in between.

And some bloke who calls himself webny99 says Kingston should count as downstate, according to the map he advocates using (shown below).

[webny99]

If one wants to leave NYC but stay in the state, upstate is a good option.

... the only option, in fact (unless you count Montauk)!

But kalvado says Albany is somewhere in between.

And some bloke who calls himself webny99 says Kingston should count as downstate, according to the map he advocates using (shown below).

[img snipped]

From the perspective of said NYC natives, however, everything is upstate, yes, even including Rockland and Westchester counties. 

[webny99]

On a more serious note, I've slightly updated my official position since we last hashed this over:
Instead of using the 42nd parallel as a hard line, I now prefer to use the nearest county lines, meaning Sullivan, Ulster, and Dutchess counties are entirely Downstate, while Delaware and Columbia counties are entirely Upstate. It's just too complicated to start splitting counties.

[hbelkins]

I hear a whole lot of people from my state saying they wished it didn't get so cold in South Dakota in the winter.

I also hear a lot of people say they're looking into relocating to Tennessee or Florida.

[Scott5114]

You are all making the "accountant's fallacy"  which is assuming the item you need exists.   There is no COVID 19 cure, and may very well never be.  But I will play along.

I mean, Pfizer and Moderna seem to think differently, but they've spent a billion dollars working on it and you haven't, so you're probably right.

- Telework.  A lot of businesses have figured out that they can work just fine, thank you very much, remotely.   If a particular white collar job, or something like 90% of it, can be done just fine from your employees' basements, then renting mega-expensive downtown office space really does not make much sense.  Lots of people will spend 90% or more of their time in a home-office.

It does make sense by the numbers. At the same time, though, don't underestimate the power of management to find a way to shoot profits in the foot by insisting that in-person collaboration is somehow worth the money. That is, "that's the way we've always done it".

- Telework, part two.  Now, if a business can be done just as well from your employee's suburban sub-division, it can be done, in many cases, from most anywhere with functional internet, and a few other things (functional air connections, business support infrastructure, etc.).  So people will leave poorly run high tax places with bad climates for well run low tax places with good climates.

Don't overestimate the amount tax policy matters. If tax policy mattered, Alaska, Wyoming, and Nevada, all states with zero state income tax, would be teeming with new residents. But they're all pretty poor places to live for other reasons.

In fact, the opposite is often true–low tax policies mean that the state cannot provide services at the level that would-be residents from higher-tax states are accustomed to. Oklahoma has trouble obtaining new residents and businesses despite its low taxes, because they have led to chronically underfunded education systems statewide, making parents unwilling to relocate here. And see also the reputation Oklahoma DOT has on this board, which to a lesser extent is shared by the general populace.

- Tele-education.  I think that we can all agree that tele-education of high schoolers and certainly of grade schoolers has failed totally.  However, most college subjects can be done quite well.  Not much of STEM or of health care, but you can learn most things just fine on-line.  Now, certainly, a lot of rich kids will continue to go to traditional college because they want to blow off four years, but a lot of average kids and poor kids will just move to the on line model.  Lots of college towns will get smaller.

I don't think the struggles experienced by students during the pandemic is necessarily 100% due to virtual education. Rather, I think it's the result of trying to stretch already-failing 20th century education models far beyond their breaking point. I've heard stories of software that monitors children's faces and logs every time their eyes stop looking at the screen, and parents getting angry emails because their kid got up to use the bathroom. This is horseshit. Education needs to get over their obsession with controlling the student and needless labor exercises for the sake of recording more grades, and more toward actually educating the students.

Also, virtual learning has been causing more problems for students from lower-income families. Not everyone can afford a computer and internet connection capable of running streaming video. This is exacerbated when schools choose to conduct their education over proprietary software like Zoom instead of open protocols that allow users to choose the software that works best with their existing hardware.

[hotdogPi]

This is exacerbated when schools choose to conduct their education over proprietary software like Zoom instead of open protocols that allow users to choose the software that works best with their existing hardware.

Zoom works perfectly fine on a Mac with no issues. Does it not work on Linux?

[Scott5114]

As for my prediction, it's dependent on whether the managers that want to micromanage and oversee everyone's work in person win out, or the managers that want to cut overhead and just get stuff done win out.

If the micromanagers win, nothing much changes. If things do change, I imagine the states will stay roughly the same relative to one another no matter what. Some states where people have relocated solely for the job market might lose some people, for example, Texas. But for the most part I think people have self-sorted into the state that fits their cultural and climate wants and the pandemic is not going to change the rate of this sorting too meaningfully. For example, if I had a job based in Oklahoma I could do remotely, it doesn't mean I would necessarily move to California even though I might like it better, because that is still a big expense and I don't know a whole lot of people out there.

I think the main changes are going to be people moving from larger cities to smaller regional centers. So Oklahoma City might lose residents to, say, Weatherford, Woodward, Chickasha, and Pauls Valley. Real estate there is cheaper, but they're still big enough to provide some level of services that a city dweller would be accustomed to, like pizza delivery, city water, and trash pickup.

I don't think most people would want to live in an actual small town where you have to deal with things like unpaved roads, getting your water from a well, or bringing your own garbage to the dump, if they hadn't grown up that way. So I don't think towns that small are likely to see much growth. Maybe a few new residents who have always wanted to move back to the town they grew up in, or people who have always wanted that lifestyle but have never been able to make it work economically, but that kind of person isn't common.

[Dirt Roads]

How about a county?  Not sure about now, but back in the Summer there was national news about the massive influx of new residents to -of all places- Montgomery County, North Carolina.  Seems as though the proximity to the virtually unknown Uwharrie Mountains and its National Forest was very appealing to displaced Nawtherners.  Being from West Virginia, it all still seems rather flat to me (I shouldn't say much, since I currently live on what might be the flattest ridge on the entire planet).

[CoreySamson]

I don't think the struggles experienced by students during the pandemic is necessarily 100% due to virtual education. Rather, I think it's the result of trying to stretch already-failing 20th century education models far beyond their breaking point. I've heard stories of software that monitors children's faces and logs every time their eyes stop looking at the screen, and parents getting angry emails because their kid got up to use the bathroom. This is horseshit. Education needs to get over their obsession with controlling the student and needless labor exercises for the sake of recording more grades, and more toward actually educating the students.

I think making the kids adhere to these stupid rules has no effect on their education, and schools need to realize that. What affects their education the most is how they get it and what settings they do the best in.

For example, I know of a kid who was a straight-A student but then had to transition to virtual learning once COVID hit. Not used to doing the work himself, he ended up flunking classes because he needed a hands-on approach to learning. He actually got so stressed about it he almost committed suicide.

On the other hand, you have me, a homeschooler, who works best with a hands-off approach to learning. I go to the bathroom whenever I need to, I eat whenever I need to, I get up whenever I need to, I do my subjects in whatever order I want to, and I work at whatever pace I want to. Yet I scored a 1400 or so on my SAT a couple of months ago, even though I was on little sleep that day because I was worrying about a brain-eating amoeba that was reported in the water supply all night; plus I've always done well at standardized tests, so I'm not dumb as a result of how I learn.

The point I'm trying to make is that every kid has a certain learning method that lets them learn better. Parents should decide what works best for their child, not the schools and their stupid rules.

[Scott5114]

This is exacerbated when schools choose to conduct their education over proprietary software like Zoom instead of open protocols that allow users to choose the software that works best with their existing hardware.

Zoom works perfectly fine on a Mac with no issues. Does it not work on Linux?

I haven't tried it myself (all of my friends run Discord instead, and I'm quarantining from anyone that wears a tie for the rest of the pandemic) but Wikipedia says it is available for Linux.

The problem is that Zoom is a proprietary protocol, meaning that if you don't like the Zoom client, or can't run it on your hardware, or the company changes something about it that interferes with your usage, you don't have any recourse. This isn't true with older chat protocols like AOL Instant Messenger or IRC, where a number of third-party clients are available that provide access to the service. If you prefer the interface of one of them better, or it runs better on your system, you don't have to use the "official" client.

Skype and Discord have the same problem, although Discord somewhat mitigates it by providing a stripped-down version of their client that can run in a Web browser window. My experience with Skype is kind of indicative of the pitfalls of using closed protocols. I started using it in 2010 to collaborate with a group of friends I had made online, as that was their preferred chat client. At the time, the Skype Linux client was fairly usable, if imperfect, and in fact I preferred their Linux client over that of the more polished Windows one.

However, in 2011, Skype was bought out by Microsoft, who began making a number of changes meant to "integrate" it more with Windows. This involved the total redesign of the client, on both Linux and Windows, which was a problem because the new client did not have the option to log chats on the client side. Without ready access to logs, I had no way of referring to conversations that had taken place months or years in the past, which was important to my use case. The only way to view old Skype messages is to scroll upward in the client and force it to load them from the server, and if you go back by too many messages, it will eventually run out of memory and freeze up. Obviously, this also meant that searching logs with Unix tools like grep(1) was impossible, and there was no built-in search facility. Had Microsoft published the Skype protocol as an open protocol, I could have switched to a third-party client that logged messages client-side, but instead I was forced to abandon the service entirely.

[ozarkman417]

This is exacerbated when schools choose to conduct their education over proprietary software like Zoom instead of open protocols that allow users to choose the software that works best with their existing hardware.

Zoom works perfectly fine on a Mac with no issues. Does it not work on Linux?

It works fine on my school Chromebook, which uses the linux-based ChromeOS. Granted, the Chromebook is so low-spec that ZOOM warns me of high-CPU usage when all I'm doing is just that: using zoom, with the possible exception of a tab for school open. When a school has to buy 25k of them, and when the district blocks just about every site not related to school, that is what they most do.

[hbelkins]

You are all making the "accountant's fallacy"  which is assuming the item you need exists.   There is no COVID 19 cure, and may very well never be.  But I will play along.

I mean, Pfizer and Moderna seem to think differently, but they've spent a billion dollars working on it and you haven't, so you're probably right.

It's a vaccine, not a therapeutic.

[I-39]

I also hear a lot of people say they're looking into relocating to Tennessee or Florida.

I live in the Nashville area and I can attest that people are continuing to move here in droves. I am renting two rooms right now to people who moved here from California this year.

Post-pandemic, I believe the Nashville/Middle Tennessee area in particular will experience an even bigger boom than what we saw in the 2010s. It wouldn't surprise me if we added another 1,000,000 residents in the metro area in the next 15-20 years.

[Scott5114]

It's a vaccine, not a therapeutic.

Which is irrelevant, because the purpose of the thread is focusing on what will happen after the pandemic is over, and vaccinations to stop the spread of the disease are a tool that will bring about that end.

[bassoon1986]

I've been saying that Louisiana will suffer after this pandemic. When the state continually ranks 50th in things like education, health, and poverty, it takes us longer to bounce back economically. With a pandemic and a couple of major hurricanes this year, I could see businesses closing or leaving LA and our population decrease even more.


iPhone

[Sctvhound]

The Charleston area here in SC has continued to grow like crazy even in the middle of the pandemic. Our housing market only has 2,000 homes to sell when there are normally 20,000. I don't know how much our population has grown this year, but our metro was at 802,000 on July 1, 2019 and it is probably 820 or so now.

There are people moving from NY and the northeast in droves because of the lower taxes. Most of the Charleston area has also handled the pandemic well compared to most of the rest of the south. Mask wearing is pretty much universal here in stores, and a lot of people wear them outside. It was bad here in June and July, but while Greenville and other parts of SC have gotten worse, it has moderated a little here.

[SP Cook]

I mean, Pfizer and Moderna seem to think differently, but they've spent a billion dollars working on it and you haven't, so you're probably right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Withdrawn_drugs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_drugs

Don't overestimate the amount tax policy matters. If tax policy mattered, Alaska, Wyoming, and Nevada, all states with zero state income tax, would be teeming with new residents. But they're all pretty poor places to live for other reasons.

You mean the Nevada that had 488K people in the 1970 census, and 3M in the 2020 census?  That Nevada? 

In fact, the opposite is often true–low tax policies mean that the state cannot provide services at the level that would-be residents from higher-tax states are accustomed to.

The idea that high state and local taxes equals "services" is nonsense. 

Also, virtual learning has been causing more problems for students from lower-income families. Not everyone can afford a computer and internet connection capable of running streaming video. This is exacerbated when schools choose to conduct their education over proprietary software like Zoom instead of open protocols that allow users to choose the software that works best with their existing hardware.

The teachers I know (every child was GIVEN a computer, although internet access is another issue) say that about half the kids simply do not work.  Last year the state just gave up and said everybody passed.  The kids, despite being told over and over that this time they are serious, are calling the bluff.  The kids are almost certainly right. 

[Kniwt]

St. George, UT, Boise, ID and Reno, NV all spring to mind with this.

St. George is continuing to boom -- Washington County population rose by 4.06% in 2020 alone, the most of any county in Utah -- traffic continues to get worse, new subdivisions spring into life seemingly overnight, and rents continue to soar.

Without delving too far into politics, I strongly suspect the pandemic isn't the only reason there are so many more California plates here these days. The 2020 election results confirmed that, rather than making southern Utah slightly more "purple," the influx of new residents only strengthened the stranglehold that one political party has on the region.

And since Washington County now also leads the state in the highest per-capita rate of new infections (roughly 5x to 6x worse than in the SF Bay Area), it's not like people are moving here to escape the virus. There are ... and we'll put this as delicately as possible ... other reasons.

[brad2971]

Hopefully, the Dakota's don't shrink that much.

By 2030, both North and South Dakota will each have 1 million residents. And COVID will have nothing to do with it (BTW, both states, even with the latest spurt, still are below national rates when it comes to deaths per positive cases ratio). North Dakota will still have the 1 million people due to continued oil exploration/production (the geopolitics of fracking is too obvious to stop), and South Dakota's scenery and libertarian(ish) fiscal policies will give that state it's 1 million people.

[planxtymcgillicuddy]

The Charleston area here in SC has continued to grow like crazy even in the middle of the pandemic. Our housing market only has 2,000 homes to sell when there are normally 20,000. I don't know how much our population has grown this year, but our metro was at 802,000 on July 1, 2019 and it is probably 820 or so now.

There are people moving from NY and the northeast in droves because of the lower taxes. Most of the Charleston area has also handled the pandemic well compared to most of the rest of the south. Mask wearing is pretty much universal here in stores, and a lot of people wear them outside. It was bad here in June and July, but while Greenville and other parts of SC have gotten worse, it has moderated a little here.

That's surprising, considering how many people I've heard call Charleston "San Francisco East" on account of taxes and overall cost of living

[kalvado]

I just realized that the closure of large employment hubs may have a larger impact than I was originally considering.

Question as a follow-up to this thought:  Can anyone think of a large corporation that's ended up shutting down a large employment center somewhere–one large enough to measurably affect the population of the city due to egress?

Maybe not large enough for the area, but Boeing is shutting down 787 assembly line in WA. There are other reasons for that, notably union tensions, but the other 787 assembly line in SC will trickle out planes in forceeable future as demand dropped to almost nothing.

[Sctvhound]

The Charleston area here in SC has continued to grow like crazy even in the middle of the pandemic. Our housing market only has 2,000 homes to sell when there are normally 20,000. I don't know how much our population has grown this year, but our metro was at 802,000 on July 1, 2019 and it is probably 820 or so now.

There are people moving from NY and the northeast in droves because of the lower taxes. Most of the Charleston area has also handled the pandemic well compared to most of the rest of the south. Mask wearing is pretty much universal here in stores, and a lot of people wear them outside. It was bad here in June and July, but while Greenville and other parts of SC have gotten worse, it has moderated a little here.

That's surprising, considering how many people I've heard call Charleston "San Francisco East" on account of taxes and overall cost of living

It still is. In the highly populated areas like West Ashley, James Island and Mt. Pleasant you pretty much have to spend at least $400K for a house. Often more. People are moving further and further out in Berkeley and Dorchester Counties because that is where the cheaper housing is.

We also have Volvo and Mercedes-Benz in our area as well with a lot of high-paying jobs.