NYC, LA suffer largest loss of workers as they flee to low-cost cities in South

New York City and Los Angeles, and their surrounding areas, suffered the largest exodus of workers as the high cost of living sent them fleeing to more affordable destinations in the South and West.

LA, Long Beach and Anaheim posted a net loss of 17,477 workers in 2023, according to a MarketWatch analysis of the most-recent full-year data from the US Census Bureau.

The Big Apple, along with Newark and Jersey City, weren’t far behind with a net loss of 15,940 workers, according to government data.

“We’ve seen people moving to warmer places, the Sun Belt, for a while, but part of what we’re seeing is important cost-of-living differences,” said Daniel Shoag, economist at Case Western Reserve University, who researches how wages have failed to keep up with costs.

“Even the parts of the country where housing has been cheaper, you see rising housing prices, and housing is just kind of expensive relative to income, [especially] given interest rates.” 

About 1.43 million people quit the New York area, while nearly 1 million people left Los Angeles.

“The standard of living doesn’t necessarily line up with wages how it used to. If you were to look back several decades ago, places that offered the highest wages also kind of offered the highest wages after your housing prices,” Shoag told The Post.

“Moving to a place with a higher wage was a way of getting a higher standard of living, and now you see these migration patterns don’t really reflect that. People aren’t moving to the highest-wage parts of the country anymore.”

The New York metro area, for example, has the highest income of all cities measured in the MarketWatch report – about $18,000 more than Jacksonville, Fla., which is one of the most popular cities Americans are relocating to.

Meanwhile, all of the top 15 metro areas for attracting workers in 2023 were in the south and southwestern parts of the US, including cities in Texas, Florida, Arizona and Tennessee.

The Dallas area saw the largest net gain of any city with 16,903 new workers in 2023. Other cities that attracted more workers than they lost were Houston (11,954), Jacksonville, Fla. (10,558) and the Nashville area (10,492).

This intense worker migration isn’t expected to let up anytime soon, with the population in North Texas – home to the Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington area – predicted to double by 2050, according to the Texas Economic Development Corp.

Housing tends to be more affordable in the southern parts of the country, especially compared to corporate meccas like New York City.

This played a huge role in the worker migration in 2023 as home buyers were slapped with the roughest housing market in nearly three decades, with mortgage rates close to 8% and a severe housing shortage.

The average home in Dallas, Texas is valued at $315,056, while a house in Los Angeles is worth $970,592, according to real-estate site Zillow.

That’s a more than 100% difference.

This study only counted US workers, so it does not reflect the overall migration trends including unemployed individuals, the elderly and children, and it does not examine the impact of surging international immigration.