Remote work caused by the Chinese Communist virus has caused many Americans to want to move.
A new U.S. study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the current determinants of where people choose to move to live.
According to ABC affiliate WKRN-TV News2’s news media website, researchers say that choosing where to live is a major, economically and socially relevant decision for people. People typically consider factors such as the local labor market, schools, housing costs and access to amenities.
They reviewed 300,000 cases of interstate migration in the United States over the years to see what factors have determined people to move since the pandemic and why this has changed.
As a result, they found that a large percentage of people are moving from large cities to smaller cities with lower costs of living, and some of the findings were surprising.
Peter Haslag, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University, and Daniel Weagley of the Georgia Institute of Technology participated in the study. Haslag said, “We found that other factors associated with COVID, including regulations and the ability to work remotely, had a greater impact on relocation decisions.”
He added that some also considered how many public health regulations were implemented in the city during the pandemic.
“We’re seeing people leaving big cities – big cities tend to have stricter regulations,” he explained. “I think 5 percent of people are saying, ‘This (restriction) is too much – we can’t go out, we can’t enjoy things, so we’re moving.’ Even though (the restrictions) are only temporary, they are costly …… If we isolate people who can’t stand the restrictions, they tend to leave Democratic states.”
The study also reveals that high-income households have a higher chance of relocating during a pandemic.
“This is a real gap between high-income and low-income households. For high-income households, because high-income jobs are more remote, the location of the job has little impact on what they do, and once they can telecommute, people can optimize on a range of different factors that they can’t when the job and the location of the job are tied together.” Haslag explains.
“We find that high-income households move less for job changes (such as losing a job or taking a new job) and more for reasons unrelated to work. In contrast, low-income households typically move for work-related reasons at about the same rate as before the epidemic, and are less likely to move for reasons such as retirement, health or lifestyle.”
The ability to work remotely was another factor that emerged during the pandemic, and researchers are trying to understand how long that mentality will last.
Working from home provides additional support or access to additional support for family members, Haslag said. “All the survey evidence suggests that more and more people want that flexibility, so what we’re seeing is that people are moving to the suburbs to get more space and they don’t have to live as much as they used to.”
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