Urban Exodus: Fact or Fiction?

Though search traffic data supplied by Zillow and Realtor.com have pointed to upticks in suburban home searches from city dwellers, Curbed says there may be little to no evidence of an urban exodus. Just as consumers scroll social media to pass time, the same can be done with home searches, the site says. If Zillow’s search data is broken down to searches by population density, search traffic from the New York metro area to suburban areas dropped, and search traffic for other urban areas grew. Curbed created their own graphs, which show the greatest year-over-year drop in urban home searches for metro areas across the US was 1% in Indianapolis.

You’ve heard the story before: After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, city dwellers fled urban centers in droves, hoping to escape the rapid spread of the virus. Now, unshackled from cities by work-from-home policies, these urban ex-pats are causing a housing market boom in suburban and rural areas.

It’s a narrative that has, since mid-March, proliferated through practically every major media outlet in the country. These new versions of “Why I Left New York” stories have helped paint a picture of a city significantly changed by people decamping to the suburbs. The only problem is that supporting evidence for this urban exodus narrative is, at best, flimsy and, at worst, nonexistent.

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