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Americans vote with their feet, flee big cities
Washington Examiner April 10, 12:00 AM April 10, 12:00 AM
The recent dump of county-level data from the Census Bureau shows that America’s big left-run cities have kept losing population long after the COVID pandemic ended.
Los Angeles County, California, for example, has lost 293,000 residents since the last Census, April 1 2020, and was still losing population at the last estimate. In the same time frame, Cook County Illinois (home to Chicago) lost 166,000. New York City’s five boroughs lost a combined 471,000. San Francisco has lost 66,000 people, or 7.6% of its population. Philadelphia County Pennsylvania lost 37,000.
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Even formerly fast-growing D.C. lost about 18,000 people during that two-year period.
Although cities are not losing people uniformly (Manhattan is one place where the population at least slightly recovered in 2022), the story is pretty much the same anywhere you look.
High taxes, poor services, and declining public safety are making many big cities hostile places to live in. People don’t always move to new states, but they often move out of bad cities.
For parents, the situation is urgent. Not only are schools in many big cities appalling, but it simply isn’t safe anymore to raise a family in many of these environments. In Washington DC, a random tourist cannot stay safely in her hotel room without being murdered by a career criminal who is supposed to be in jail. This is a direct consequence of soft-on-crime prosecutors and judges turning loose hardened criminals and people with serious untreated mental disorders.
So where are people going to live? They’re going to newer and better-run cities in dry desert places such as Boise and Meridian, Idaho. In spite of what Democrats tell you, people looking for a better place to live aren’t put off by the fact that this state has open carry of firearms, a near-total abortion ban, and execution by firing squad. Even if those are not majority political positions in the U.S., most people find it a heck of a lot better than having to live amid filthy homeless encampments and Antifa violence and intimidation in Portland, Los Angeles or San Francisco.
People are also moving to Montana, Utah, Arizona, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Florida and Texas. That’s because these are all places where they can count on a friendly business environment and getting their money’s worth for their tax dollars.
In the end, that’s what real “inclusion” is about. It’s not about replicating the performative claptrap peddled by the Left, it’s about creating a place where people want to be. If California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) were to threaten to build a wall today at San Francisco’s city limits, which way would the refugee traffic move? Outward.
Create an environment where individuals and families can grow and flourish and raise children, then they will move in. Create an environment where workers strain under high taxes, businesses are strangled in red tape, and violent criminals are given free rein to terrorize ordinary residents in the streets, they will do what they have to in order to leave.
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