Forget the Sunbelt. More people are moving to the Snowbelt.

Yahoo

09-04-2025

The Sunbelt isn't quite as hot — for movers, that is — as it once was.
The pandemic and remote work initially drove people to the South, but that trend has slowed.
Some Midwestern states, particularly Wisconsin and Missouri, are attracting more residents.
Midwestern small towns and suburbs are in luck.
Over the last few decades, domestic migration to the Sunbelt has slowed — and the Midwest is becoming the new place to be.
In the mid-20th century, large numbers of Americans traded chillier, pricier locales in the North — also known as the Snowbelt — for balmy winters and cheaper homes across the South and Southwest, also called the Sunbelt. When the pandemic hit, the widespread adoption of remote work spurred a new surge of Americans to move to Florida, Texas, Arizona, the Carolinas, and other states across the Sunbelt.
But the COVID-related spike in southern transplants obscures a longer-term reverse trend. Over the last few decades, moves to the Sunbelt have significantly slowed. And more recently, some Midwestern and Northeastern states have been losing fewer people than they did pre-pandemic, and a few have even gained population. Rural areas in particular have seen an uptick in movers, creating a reverse Sunbelt to Snowbelt migration trend.
Just before the pandemic, Missouri and Wisconsin were experiencing net population losses, but now they're growing, a new paper from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found. Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan have seen their outflows slow post-pandemic. In the Northeast, Connecticut has also seen outward migration slow.
Two economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, Sylvain Leduc, and Daniel Wilson, similarly reported last year that the warmest places in the country have seen their population growth slow while the coldest places are growing. They argue that as temperatures rise with climate change, that trend looks like it's here to stay.
"The 'pivoting' in the U.S. climate-migration correlation over the past 50 years is likely to continue, leading to a reversal of the 20th century Snow Belt to Sun Belt migration pattern," they wrote.
It's not totally clear why we're seeing this new Sunbelt-to-Snowbelt trend, but cost-of-living issues and climate change could be factors, the researchers wrote.
Housing costs have spiked in much of the Sunbelt and South, particularly over the last few years, helping slow southern migration, Riordan Frost, a research analyst at Harvard and the author of the paper, told Business Insider.
"Not only in the typically super high-cost states has affordability been an issue, but it's becoming more of an issue in the Sunbelt," Frost said.
At the same time, much of the Snowbelt, particularly more rural areas, has stayed relatively affordable. The North is also experiencing less frigid winters, while the Sunbelt grows ever steamier, making the Snowbelt increasingly attractive.
"These new migration trends should help mitigate the effects of climate change, as fewer people would be directly exposed to the negative impacts of hotter and more frequent extreme heat days," Leduc and Wilson wrote.
Zooming out, it's important to note that many Americans are staying put. Household mobility in the US has plummeted since its peak in the 1980s, falling from a rate of 18% in 1986 to 9.7% in 2019. The pandemic briefly disrupted that trend, but over the last couple of years rates of moving have continued their pre-2020 decline trajectory.
And a big part of the problem is elevated housing costs. Many can't afford to move because of elevated mortgage rates, home prices, and rents. Others fear losing the low-interest home loans they secured when interest rates fell in the early months of the pandemic.
"In general, the homeowner mobility rate has really plunged, and that's dragging down the overall mobility rate quite a bit," Frost said.
Have you moved to the Midwest — or left? Reach out to this reporter at [e-mail].
Read the original article on Business Insider