This City Lost the Most Residents in 2021

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jun 13, 6:17AM EDT · Published Jun 12, 9:24AM EDT

This City Lost the Most Residents in 2021 — © DenisTangneyJr / iStock via Getty Images

Americans have moved from city to city frequently during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are several reasons. Among them is that some people want to leave the large expensive cities on the coasts, which include San Francisco and New York, for smaller cities inland.

The ability to relocate has been helped by two trends. One is historically low mortgage rates. The rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage dropped below 3%. (The period ended quickly. Mortgage rates have risen above 5%). Another reason for newfound mobility is the fact that more and more people can work from home. Some companies that shuttered their offices because of the pandemic may never open them again.

To identify the city that lost the most residents, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed metropolitan area population data from the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2021 estimates of population and components of change. Metro areas were ranked by the percent change in population from July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, due to migration alone.

In that time, metropolitan areas centered around New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago lost a combined 825,998 people due to net domestic migration. Several metro areas with populations of over 1 million people, including San Diego, Boston, Washington and Miami each lost tens of thousands of residents in that 12-month period.

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By far, California has been most affected by this exodus. The San Jose and San Francisco metro areas lost 2.5% and 2.6% of their populations, respectively, in the 12 months to July 2021. Smaller California cities like Napa and Salinas also experienced significant population declines due to more people moving out of these areas than moving in.

The city that lost the most people last year was Lake Charles, Louisiana. Here are the details:

> Pct. change due to migration, 2020 to 2021: -5.3%
> Net domestic migration, 2020 to 2021: -11,914
> Net international migration, 2020 to 2021: +90
> Total population, 2021: 210,362

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Click here to see all the cities that lost the most people in 2021.

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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.