The American City People Are Fleeing

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Nov 7, 7:52AM EST · Published Nov 6, 10:30AM EST

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The American City People Are Fleeing — © Andrew Burton / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Americans became unusually mobile early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the reason was the mortgage rates were at 3% for months, which made homes historically affordable. The other was that people could work from home. Among the patterns was that people left the largest, most expensive cities for those less populated with lower living costs. While 7% mortgage rates have slowed home demand, there are still several metros people want to leave in droves. At the top of this list is Detroit, the poorest large city in the United States.

Real estate website Redfin reviewed search data on cities people wanted to move to and those people wanted to leave. CNBC reviewed the study and commented, “Of all homebuyers that search for property, 24.2% are looking for a home in a different metro area than where they live.” The research was based on a review of 2 million searches on Refine over the third quarter. Across 100 metros, the metric used was “for sale homes” by city.

The city with the highest percentage of people who searched elsewhere was Detroit at 32%. Cleveland, another poor industrial city, was at the top of the cities Detroit residents wanted to go to. The yardstick measured the difference between people who looked to move to a city compared to those who wanted to leave.

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The research did not mention why Detroit was the city the most people wanted to leave. In a sense, it is counterintuitive. The study stressed that people wanted to go to affordable cities. Detroit, however, based on home prices, must have among the lowest home prices of any big city in the nation.

Detroit may be so badly damaged by the number of people who have left since the middle of the last century that parts of it are uninhabitable. At the peak of the success of the American car industry, 1.5 million people lived in Detroit. That figure is currently under 700,000. Parts of the city are so blighted that homes have been torn down by the hundreds. City services are barely available in some neighborhoods because the city budget is so small.

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Homes may be cheap in Detroit. However, there are reasons, and they are not good ones.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.