Americans Want to Flee This City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jun 24, 6:57AM EDT · Published Jun 23, 6:24AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Americans Want to Flee This City — © shalunts / iStock via Getty Images

24/7 Insights

Cities people want to leave are led by Los Angeles and other cities on the coasts.
One primary reason is cost of living.

In the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans began to move from where they lived to where they would like to live. People could work from home and were no longer tied to offices. The cost of living and climate also drove a part of this migration. Many of the people who moved went to places like Boise and Phoenix. People living on America’s coasts found they could live inland for less money.

Real estate firm Redfin looks at the cities Americans want to leave, and those people want to move to. The period covered was March 2024 to May 2024. The methodology did not have to do with actual relocations. Across a sample of about 2 million people, Redfin looked at home search patterns.

The results were similar to other migration behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic years. People planned to move out of Los Angeles in huge numbers. A total of 36,500 considered leaving the largest West Coast city. New York followed it at 32,200, San Francisco at 25,800, and Seattle at 20,100.

Numbeo confirms how expensive the cities people want to leave are. Based on its “cost of living” index, New York is the most expensive city in America. San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles follow it.

Where are people going? Inland and to Florida. The city at the top of where people want to go is inland from the Pacific Coast, close to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Sacramento is in first place, followed by Phoenix, then Sarasota and Cape Coral in Florida.

This is each state’s worst city to live in.

∴

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.