Sunday, May 22, 2016

From Wonkblog: "The states people really want to move to — and those they don’t"

Wonkblog is affiliated with The Washington Post and it's a site you should check out every now and then for a big picture view on what's happening in the country. This article is a very short one but sums up the situation here in south Florida quite well: Florida is once again the place to be for many Americans seeking another place to live. Note when you read the excerpt below, these numbers do not include those immigrating to this country, only those Americans moving from other states.

What's lagging is the amount of housing available and, predictably, those costs are going up. Here is an excerpt from the article in Wonkblog that should give policy-makers and political leaders a good reason to be very concerned:

     When the U.S. economy slowed during the recession, so did one of the major demographic shifts of the last several decades. For a brief respite, the Northeast and Midwest stopped shedding quite so many residents to the burgeoning Sun Belt. That trend, though — which has big consequences for politics, among other things — has been picking back up. 
     New census data shows the trend accelerating back to its pre-recession pace. Florida, which actually lost more domestic movers than it gained right after the housing bubble burst, picked up about 200,000 net new movers between 2014 and 2015 [emphasis added] (this number includes people who move between states, not immigration into the United States from abroad). Illinois, meanwhile, had a net loss of about 105,000 residents, its largest one-year population leak in the 21st century.

Locally, here in Lake Worth, we're seeing an uptick in new residents, new apartments and condos being built, along with the inevitable hand-wringing about things like "growth" and "over-development". The Great Recession was just down tick on the overall upward trend of the U.S. population moving from places like the Northeast to places such as south Florida and there's no sign this trend is going to change any time soon.