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Life, Liberty, Property #56: People Are Fleeing Blue Cities—and Their Suburbs

April 1, 2024

Life, Liberty, Property #56: People are fleeing Blue Cities—and their suburbs—due to crime, taxes, and deteriorating services and schools.

IN THIS ISSUE:

People Are Fleeing Blue Cities—and Their Suburbs
Squatters’ Rights and Wrongs
Vox Populi: Teach Core Subjects, Reject CRT
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People Are Fleeing Blue Cities—and Their Suburbs

As we have noted regularly in past issues of this newsletter, the deliberate refusal to maintain law and order in the nation’s major cities has generated a hastening downward spiral of living conditions. Bad policies create bad outcomes, productive people leave, government increases taxes, more people leave, government runs shortfalls and cuts services, more people leave, and the process continues.

Millions of American urbanites have been victimized by the rise of crime; retail stores, restaurants, bars, and other gathering places have closed down or fled to less-disturbed places; declining service and lack of commuter safety have made public transit a reasonable choice only for the desperate, which in older large American cities includes the vast majority of the working population; large areas are no-go zones because of the preponderance of unpredictable homeless people; illegal immigrants flood the local schools and make learning difficult for those already there; declining city services and torn-up streets impede commerce and safety; and so on.

These deteriorating conditions spur productive people and businesses to move out, thus shrinking the tax base and making it even more difficult for these cities to improve services and restore public order, if inclined to do so—which appears not to be the case in many places.

The new metro area population estimates from the Census Bureau confirm this. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP) reports,

Major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lost 2 million net domestic migrants to other parts of the nation in just three years (2021-2023). This contrasts sharply with the early 2010s (2011-2013) when major metros gained 352,000 net domestic migrants and the balance of the nation lost 352,000.

Ace demographer Wendell Cox notes that this trend has been in place for well over a decade: “From the early 2010s to 2022, net domestic migration in the United States has evolved strongly toward less populated areas,” Cox writes. Here are the figures in a table by Cox:

The movement of people from larger metropolitan areas to smaller ones includes suburbanites. The urban core counties are leading the surge in emigration, CTUP notes:

All of the 10 largest metropolitan areas but one lost net domestic migrants from their urban core counties (even fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Atlanta). Phoenix was the exception, gaining net domestic migrants. The three largest net domestic migration suburban county gains were in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Philadelphia.

CTUP provides a chart showing that this outmigration is not, however, just a matter of people in big cities moving to the nearby suburbs. Instead, people are even fleeing the suburban counties in older large metropolitan areas:

Source: Committee to Unleash Prosperity

“Liberals blame this on racism—except now even the minorities are stampeding out,” CTUP notes. The mass exodus is instead the result of increasingly chaotic misrule by Democrats over the decades, CTUP argues, headlining the article with this: “Millions of Americans Are Fleeing Blue ‘Progressive’ Cities and Moving as Far Away as They Can Get.”

That is an accurate assessment of the situation, and I believe that a major factor in the accelerating migration is these governments’ conscious choice, during the past decade, not to apprehend and prosecute those who engage in criminal activities. Broken streetlights, tangled traffic, and streets marred by potholes are inconveniences. Crime is a dire threat to a person’s very life and well-being.

People cannot live productive lives when continually menaced by thugs and drug addicts the local governments deliberately unleash on them.

Cox rightly notes that housing affordability tracks well with this outmigration:

Figure 1 shows that since 2010 housing affordability net domestic migration (moving between locations in the 50 states and the District of Columbia) has been strongly moving from the least affordable markets to the more affordable markets.

Among the more unaffordable markets, net outward migration from the severely unaffordable markets increased from a net loss of 76,000 for 2010 to 2015 to a net loss of 810,000 in 2021 and 2022. These costly markets lost a population equal to that of the city of San Francisco. Most of these losses occurred in the largest markets, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

This, too, however, is likewise based in great part on government mismanagement: “The severely unaffordable markets are generally more strongly regulated, and often have urban containment regulation, which creates upward spikes in land at values at surrounding urban growth boundaries and greenbelts,” Cox writes.

Among the most affordable markets are areas that provide more peaceful lifestyles without requiring a severe reduction in wage income or loss of access to such urban amenities as shopping, museums, sporting events, and restaurants, Cox notes:

Some of these communities are close enough to larger metropolitan areas for people to work from home a day or two a week. In our increasingly dispersed economy, the lower cost of living typical of smaller communities and their lifestyles, which tends to be slower and more family oriented, has become more attractive in recent years.

It’s not all about affordability, however. As the editorial board of Issues and Insights (I&I) notes, the defining characteristic of the biggest gainers and losers in all the nation’s counties is whether their residents voted for Donald Trump in 2020:

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released data on “net domestic migration.” This tracks where people are moving between counties in the country. Last year, the 10 counties that gained the most through net migration had one thing in common—they were conservative counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

At the other end of the spectrum, all 10 counties that saw the biggest negative net migration also have one thing in common—they all voted for Biden in 2020. That includes two blue counties located in red states—Miami-Dade County, Florida, (where Biden beat Trump 53%-46%), and Dallas County, Texas, (where Biden got 65% of the vote).

Correlation is not causation, of course. However, it stands to reason that local governments in Trump-supporting counties would be more conservative in their policies and those in Biden-voting regions would be more leftist. The editors confirmed this with an analysis of the overall numbers:

People have been fleeing liberal counties in droves for each of the past three years.I&I conducted a detailed analysis of the latest Census data, comparing migration trends and the 2020 election outcomes for all 3,144 counties. What we found is that Biden-voting counties lost a net of 3.7 million people (3,670,516 to be exact) to Trump-voting counties from 2020 through 2023. (That’s up by more than a million since we did this same analysis last year.)

In other words, in just the three years after Biden won his election, more than 1% of the [U.S.] population had packed up and moved out of counties that voted for him.

That is impressive: “3.7 million have fled counties that voted for Biden,” the article’s headline notes. One wonders how many tens of millions more would have moved if financial and family circumstances and other such ties had not prevented them from doing so.

Digging further into the numbers, the I&I editors found a two-thirds correspondence between a county’s presidential choice and whether it gained or lost residents after Biden took office: “Of the 555 counties that voted for Biden, 343 (or 62%) lost population since 2020. Of the 2,589 counties that voted for Trump, 1,726 (or 67%) gained population.”

Among those counties with the worst population losses, the association with Biden support was a pretty conclusive 100 percent: “The 11 counties that had the biggest population declines over the past three years all voted for Biden,” I&I reports. “They lost a net total of 2 million people.”

Support for Trump was associated with population gains even in counties in states that lost population overall, and the opposite occurred in Biden-supporting areas. “Trump counties saw gains in several states that lost population overall, and Biden counties saw declines in population-gaining states such as Texas and Florida,” I&I reports.

States that vote for Republican presidential candidates have better governments, lower tax rates, better job markets, higher fertility rates with a widening advantage over other states, much smaller percentages of homeless people, lower murder rates at the county level, and better protections against vote fraud, and they are superior in a variety of other measures.

On the negative side of the ledger, red states have higher divorce rates than blue ones. It is instructive to note, however, that high divorce rates are associated not with public policy but instead can be explained “solely through the earlier transitions to adulthood and lower incomes of conservative Protestants” who are more prevalent in red states.

Red-state policies are associated with positive outcomes. It seems clear that these government policies are causing the differences between red and blue states and that is why people are moving to states run by Republicans.

The nation’s biggest cities, all run by Democrats, are increasingly driving people out of their core areas and out of the nearby suburbs. This is all a result of the awful mismanagement and arrogance of urban governments in one-party, Democrat-controlled cities. The people are voting with their feet, leaving these cities and their problems for greener pastures. Meanwhile, many of those cities continue to double down on the policies that have been destroying them, ensuring greater misery for those left behind.

Source: Committee to Unleash Prosperity; Newgeography; Newgeography; Issues and Insights

Squatters’ Rights and Wrongs

The mainstream media have recently been paying some attention to the rising problem of squatters illegally occupying people’s homes.

A week ago, NBC Nightly News ran a national story on property owners’ difficulties in getting governments to cooperate in removing squatters from their properties. Local New York City TV stations and newspapers extensively covered the arrest of a homeowner in Queens who was arrested for changing the locks on her house to keep squatters out. A local Los Angeles TV station took viewers “inside a multi-million dollar mansion that residents say was being used by squatters.”

NBC News reported on the arrest of two New York City teens after the dead body of the apartment owner’s daughter was found in a duffel bag in the space they were illegally occupying (after the woman who was killed went to check on the property, obviously not a coincidence). Newsweek reported on a Georgia squatter demanding $190,000 in damages from a property owner who tried to have him evicted. Newsweek also reported on a Bellevue, Washington landlord who has been blocked from entering his home for the past two years because the state granted a squatter a Temporary Protection Order against the homeowner.

The New York Post has led the way with its laudable coverage of the NYC squatter story, highlighting the fact that local governments often favor people illegally occupying houses over the property owners, plus its report on a TikToker from Venezuela “with a 500,000 strong online following” who “is offering his comrades tips on how to ‘invade’ unoccupied homes and invoke squatters’ rights in the United States,” in a clip that has drawn more than 3.9 million views. Other outlets have picked up both stories.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis made headlines last Wednesday by signing legislation that increases penalties for squatting and authorizes police to remove squatters immediately. House Bill 621, aptly named simply “Property Rights,” passed unanimously in both houses of the state legislature.

“If you are the victim of squatting you can simply fill out a form, give it to your local sheriff, and the sheriff is instructed to go and remove the people who are inhabiting your dwelling illegally,” DeSantis told the press upon signing the bill into law.

The new Florida law also sets criminal penalties for presenting a fake deed or lease, prohibits the unauthorized sale or renting of residential properties, and makes it a felony to cause $1,000 or more in damages to those properties.

This attention to property rights and governments’ perverse protection of home invaders is long overdue. The notion that people can enter your property and take it over, and the government would then actively prevent you from evicting them, defies common sense and constitutes a major assault on property rights.

The squatters take advantage of state and local “‘adverse possession’ laws, which permit someone to take ownership of something, most commonly a piece of real estate, that they do not officially own by possessing or living in it for a set amount of time, or ‘squatting’ in it,” as Newsweek notes. These laws were supposedly intended to prevent property owners from evicting renters without due cause, a valid concern. Unfortunately, the laws and their enforcement processes have degenerated into the idea of “squatters’ rights,” with property rights being transferred, for all practical purposes, from the legal owners to increasingly brazen invaders.

This undermining of property rights has a national parallel in President Joe Biden’s deliberate neglect of the nation’s border and unleashing of a massive invasion of illegally resident aliens. It also bears similarities to state and local governments’ rampant ignoring of crimes by “peaceful protestors” who killed people and destroyed billions of dollars in property in 2020 and after with impunity.

All levels of the American government have been increasingly lax in their protection of people’s property rights and have openly incited criminal activity—except in the case of protestors against abortion, anti-American indoctrination of children in schools, the 2020 election processes, and other such politically protected policies.

The American Dream has always centered on owning property and building a life for oneself in a home that serves as a refuge from the troubles of the world. Governments have a duty to protect individuals’ property rights. Designating thieves as “tenants” and arresting homeowners for trying to take their houses back is outrageous and un-American.

Sources: New York Post; NewsNation

Vox Populi: Teach Core Subjects, Reject CRT

Americans overwhelmingly want schools to concentrate on core academic subjects and not to teach Critical Race Theory, a new poll has found.

“Eighty-seven percent of voters indicated that schools should focus on math, reading and science,” Heartland Daily News reports on a poll conducted by Nobel Predictive for The Center Square news organization. As to CRT, “The poll found that 51% of likely voters said critical race theory should not be mandatory in K-12 school, while 36% said it should be taught,” HDN reports.

There was a much greater political division regarding CRT than over the teaching of core subjects.

“Republicans were far more likely to say [CRT] should not be taught (71%) than Democrats (28%),” HDN reports. “The majority of Democrats (55%) said it should be taught. The majority of true independents, 51%, said they were opposed to the CRT framework in K-12 education.”

In addition, there were distinct racial and age divides over this high-tension issue: “Black voters reported the highest support for making critical race theory mandatory in education at 59%, followed by those ages 18-34 at 56%,” HDN reports.

Concentration on core academic subjects received strong support across all identified demographics and political affiliations:

Support spanned political affiliations with Democrats (83%), Republicans (90%) and true independents (88%) coalescing.

Overall, only 10% of voters signaled disagreement. Of those, young people ages 18-34 (17%), Black voters (14%) and those of other races (14%) were most likely to disagree that schools should focus on the core subjects.

Two points are of particular interest here.

One, Americans overwhelmingly want schools to equip children with knowledge and skills that will give them the best chance to thrive when they reach adulthood. That should not be a controversial thought, and the American people have reached a powerful consensus on it. Opposition to this commonsense policy appears to be confined overwhelmingly to professional educators, teachers unions, and union-backed politicians.

The second point of interest is that independents are much closer to the views of Republicans than to Democrats on the respect for core subjects and disapproval of CRT.

There’s a bit of complexity in the results because twice as many independents as Republicans answered “Don’t know/unsure”—20 percent versus 10 percent. Disapproval of mandating CRT in schools encompassed 71 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of Democrats, and 51 percent of independents. Approval of CRT was voiced by 18 percent of Republicans, 55 percent of Democrats, and 29 percent of independents.

As those numbers show, Republicans and independents are much closer to each other in their opinions about the teaching of core subjects and CRT than they are to Democrats.

Source: Heartland Daily News