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    [OC] Regional US Population Shifts: The Growth of the Sunbelt
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    [OC] Regional US Population Shifts: The Growth of the Sunbelt

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    3. ownage516 on

      I love the Northeast but it’s so fucking expensive and if you don’t build housing, this is what you get.

    5. Shurubles on

      That’s very interesting. As a non-American, would anyone care to oversimplify the reasons to me?

      I kinda imagine that NE migration was/is due to HCOL/taxes (by taxes I mean both on a personal and business level), same deal with the recent CA exodus. South should be more attractive on both those categories, so it would explain the population gain. If that’s correct, what would explain the Midwest exodus? Industries closing/moving?

    6. allophonous-rex on

      “California exodus” population declined 0.9% from 2020-2022 and grew only 1% in 2024. So relatively flat and slight contraction during the pandemic but not the hyperbole some news media report.

    7. twistthespine on

      What would these trends look like if based on raw numbers rather than percentages? Our population has grown so much that I imagine many of the “declines” would look more like modest increases.

    8. mistephe on

      I really wish they’d divide the west a bit more effectively. Beyond California’s population dominating statistics like this, there are fairly drastic cultural and geographic differences in such a massive area.

    13. hiro111 on

      The US population in 1970 was 203MM. It’s now about 345MM. I wonder how much if this is driven by immigration preferentially settling in the South rather than internal migration to the south.

    15. crimeo on

      This graph is not wrong, but is pretty misleading, because it sort of suggests for most people (who are not very data literate on average) that people are leaving the midwest for example and that its population is shrinking. But it’s not, the population is growing. Just *not as fast* as the west, etc.

      I think it would match what most people care about more if it was a graph of just all of their actual populations.

    16. Lanceparte on

      My prediction is that the Midwest is going to start ticking back up at property values go down and people begin looking for cooler areas with access to fresh water

    18. tylerderped on

      Why are people moving to the south? Other than Virginia, *every* southern state is a shithole.

    20. zobblor on

      Everyone seems to be treating this as specifically a graph showing internal migration from the west/northeast to the south. Isn’t it more likely that this change is due to things like birth rate and immigration?

    21. Hot-Childhood8342 on

      Next development. South begins to decline from vaccine-preventable illness in Trump heavy areas reducing the population.

    22. Ignorred on

      It’s actually less drastic than I would have guessed. 120 years ago, the midwest and northeast made up 64% of the country. Today, they make up 40% of the country. Hardly a crazy shift for over a century.

    25. Prefer_Ice_Cream on

      I wonder if you could show ‘twistthespine’s absolute growth edited for organic growth versus migration? Sort of isolating and separating organic growth from mobilizing.

      I mean, how many people are actually packing up and moving? I guess the data would be overshadowed by general the prevailing mobility of the population, but I’m curious about how many (and also what proportion of) folks actually pick up and move out of state.

    27. Chickat28 on

      Thats why the sun belt is trending to be the new blue wall. Maybe not for a decade but its happening.