The Millennials Who Ditched Cities During the Pandemic Would Like a Word

Even before Covid hit, Nicolette Ross, now 40, was contemplating a move. She was part of a community of artists and entrepreneurs in Chicago—she managed a printmaking studio and freelanced as a printmaker and custom binder—for a decade. But in 2020, because of Covid social isolation, Ross and her coworker spent less time in the studio together, interns left when schools shuttered, and her husband’s work at a brewery slowed. It was lonely, Ross says. City life around them seemed to wilt. "I think so much of what makes Chicago amazing is the opportunities: You can get out and see people and connect on a personal level, face to face," she says. It became a "static" time, she says of 2020, when "the city didn’t feel alive anymore."

The death of the city was a feared outcome during the pandemic. Residents like Ross watched beloved institutions and public spaces go dark. Living in a city for work (which went remote) or to access cultural opportunities (which closed), all for sky-high prices, was no longer a reason to stay. Many asked: What is this place without those amenities? Importantly, some began to ask, Who am I without them?

According to the 2025 State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, from 2020 to 2021, large metro suburbs saw an increase in residents, but smaller metro areas and rural counties saw larger relative populations moving in. U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data from this same period shows that the counties encompassing New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles lost the most residents. Now, more than five years since Covid first appeared in the U.S., the population shifts from large urban cores to smaller cities and towns remain remarkable, challenging consistent decades of urban growth.

People ages 25 to 44 were the drivers of this rural renaissance, according to a 2024 report from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. But millennials and elder Gen Zers aren’t necessarily seeking out a pastoral fantasy. Some are pushed from their homes by rising rents; others are pulled by a job or cultural opportunity, family needs, or the promise of owning a home. But during a housing crisis, is abandoning city life really still a viable path toward the American dream?

While stuck at home during lockdowns, Ross encouraged her husband to apply for jobs everywhere. In early 2021, one offer took them to Brevard, North Carolina, a small town 40 minutes southwest of Asheville, wedged between popular outdoor recreation spots. The area is populated by existing owners, she says; new growth is restricted by a number of factors, including the protection of natural areas. Ross and her husband were able to rent a unit in a duplex and now hope to stay. She started her own printing press and bindery, which has since grown. But even with savings, the options for home buying are scarce.

"If we do want to stay here forever, we’re going to have to figure out housing long term. And that doesn’t seem achievable here at this moment," Ross says, as the median home sticker price in Brevard is $570,000, according to current Realtor.com data.

The housing shortage driving home prices is at the center of a 2025 Atlantic article, "How Progressives Froze the American Dream," in which journalist Yoni Appelbaum documents the rise and fall of American mobility. Despite waves of relocation over the past five years, we have, overall, moved much less. "In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year.… In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved," Appelbaum writes. Core to the decline, he asserts, is that we must choose between cheaper, abundant housing or good jobs and schools. Location without trade-offs is essential to reversing "declining prospects," lost economic productivity, and "restoring the American promise."

Rachel Penn, a physical therapy assistant who lived in the Denver area for more than a decade, was able to make a rural relocation work in 2023. During Covid, being in a small townhouse with a toddler was challenging. She and her husband had always dreamed of owning a house with some land, but Denver’s median home price in 2020 was more than half a million dollars—up 45 percent from when they bought their house in 2012. They’d need to move to make their vision possible and decided to relocate to Tolland, Connecticut, to be closer to family. They bought a house on a cul-de-sac with funds from selling in Denver’s hot market.

"I had never imagined spending the type of money we did on our house, but I also never imagined making the kind of money that we made off of the sale of our townhome," Penn says. There were trade-offs: Denver’s access to the outdoors had been integral to Penn’s identity. "So much of myself and what I valued was about Colorado," she explains. "It was taken away from me when I left, and I almost went through a grieving process."

But that grief passed quickly, as moving allowed her to discover new ways to parent. "When we bought this house, we had no idea that we would have the parent community that we have, and I can’t imagine not having it now," Penn says. In her Denver neighborhood, accessing a community of parents was difficult. But in Tolland, she says, it’s easy to meet your neighbors, and kids often play at one another’s houses.

Moving can afford us the ability to develop or deepen a sense of identity. Even though Ross isn’t yet able to buy in Brevard, her move awakened a love of foraging and botany. "In a broader sense, [moving] made me find myself a little bit, get closer to myself at my core," she says.

During the pandemic, the media’s framing around relocation was concentrated on the wealthy: The New York Times reported in June 2022 that much of the city’s exodus involved its richest residents, with those who moved having collectively reported more than $21 billion in income in 2019. Relocating itself is pricey, but buying a home in a high-demand market fueled by low interest rates is even less attainable. From 2019 to 2021, average nationwide rents increased 12 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. For some, however, leaving wasn’t a function of wealth; they were simply priced out.

Architect A. L. Hu, 35, left New York City in 2022 after living with their then-partner (now husband), Noah, in Columbia University student housing. "I joked that [Columbia] was a good rent deal," says Hu. (The average rent for a Columbia-owned one-bedroom is $2,507.) "But, it turns out, it’s the truth, and it’s not funny. Everything else is crazy, bonkers amounts of money." Noah was finishing his PhD and knew they would soon no longer be eligible for student housing, so the couple looked elsewhere to live and settled on Stamford, Connecticut; it was more affordable and still allowed Hu to commute into the city for their teaching job. In December 2024, they found themselves moving again, this time to Hayward, California, a small city in the Bay Area, to be closer to family. The shift was made possible by living in Hu’s childhood home, where the couple now pay a fixed rent to Hu’s parents.

A "forced" relocation from large cities isn’t novel: When nearly half of Americans are rent burdened, housing costs are a heavy factor driving migration. This dynamic impacts lower-income populations but has spread upward into higher-income households. Charles Weak, 32, also an architect, spent the early part of the pandemic in Washington, D.C., but he says the experience left him feeling isolated. Having visited New York frequently, he was drawn to the city’s cultural scene, which solidified his decision to move there in 2022. He wanted to live in a place where, he says, you don’t have to dig very far to find a community of like-minded arts enthusiasts. But earlier this year, Weak moved again, back to his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska.

New York City was expensive, but the issue became existential. "If you’re living in New York, you’re spending all this money and you want to get something out of it. And thus begins the insane feedback loop: I have to do everything. I spend a lot of money to do everything. I don’t have any money," Weak says. When he considered that he was spending 35 to 40 percent of his income on rent, the math just didn’t make sense.

Similar forces are documented in the 2024 book Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City, by Richard E. Ocejo, which examines Newburgh, New York, a postindustrial small city 66 miles north of Manhattan. Early transplants who migrated from New York City in the mid- to late-20th century, as Ocejo notes, "had an avocation (owning and restoring a historic home) and/or a need for affordable real estate for an artistic career or business…even though New York City at the time still had affordable real estate."

"And thus begins the insane feedback loop: I have to do everything. I spend a lot of money to do everything. I don’t have any money."

—Charles Weak, Omaha, Nebraska

Later waves that arrived just after the Great Recession, however, had a different type of migrant identity. As luxury housing continued to be built in New York City and affordable areas disappeared, some residents found the big city "inhospitable to their desired urban lifestyle and identity": "Many of today’s newcomers to Newburgh use the term ‘priced out’...though few actually left in direct response to their rents rising or their landlord pressuring them to move out," Ocejo writes. "But cost still played an important role in their decision to relocate…. They felt displaced from their own potential and opportunities to thrive as middle-class urbanites living a specific city lifestyle in the metropolis."

Herein lies the tension between getting "pushed" from a city versus "pulled." Some contemporary migrants are pushed from a particular lifestyle and pulled by a promise that it can be built elsewhere. Unlike midcentury white flight—which was highly dependent on the construction of suburban housing, racism, and statecraft—middle-class millennials (especially those facing mounting city prices and remote work) find that smaller cities and towns cater to a broader vision for life, one that provides opportunities to buy a house, build a business, or comfortably raise a family.

But new residents can create novel pressures. While Newburgh may be unusual in its proximity to New York City and its architectural history, in towns that saw a pandemic real estate rush, demand caused housing prices to rise. "House price appreciation during the pandemic was greater in lower-density suburban counties, smaller metropolitan areas, and non-metropolitan areas," Fannie Mae reports, compared with that of urban counties. Some of these places still struggle to keep pace with demand. When Liz Turner completed her law degree at Harvard in 2023, she was able to fulfill a long-standing goal of returning to Vermont, her home state, after securing a job there. She saved some money and went on the hunt to buy a home she could afford. It proved challenging.

The Public Assets Institute reports that Covid brought a surge in population in Vermont. The state’s housing shortage is increasing; the 2025 Housing Needs Assessment found that it has to build between 24,000 and 36,000 new, year-round homes from 2025 to 2029 to meet demand. Turner found a home in Barre City, near Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, for around $300,000, a price at which she says "houses start being livable."

"We closed on our house in August 2024. Our house last sold in 2022 for $230,000, and [the previous owner] didn’t ask for that much more than what he bought it for. But the person before that bought it in 2014 for $169,000, and that owner didn’t do much to make it nicer. You see that a lot when you look at the last-sold data; a lot of the houses on the market now were last sold in 2018 or 2019 for a full third less than what they’re selling for now," Turner says.

It’s difficult to measure other types of civic and developmental growth resulting from population shifts across the country. Ocejo’s book documents how this kind of change benefits "gentrification stakeholders" who build coalitions and promote endeavors that primarily benefit themselves. In places like California’s High Desert region, where home values increased between 63 and 84 percent during Covid, the San Francisco Chronicle reported concerns over traffic and loss of character—though much of the anxiety was tied to housing affordability that favors out-of-town wealth over longtime residents.

Still, some newcomers strive to be part of their town’s civic life. Turner recently joined Barre City’s development review board and hopes to get more involved in local climate-resiliency efforts after the state saw record rainfall and subsequent flooding. Ross has been more cautious, building relationships with locals and paying attention to discussions on one of Brevard’s Facebook pages. Hu has attended events at a local urban garden in Fremont, a city near Hayward.

"When people move from one community to another…they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness," Appelbaum writes. What this might mean for rural or metro areas is yet to be seen. But for people moving out of large cities, it’s redefining what upward mobility might look like. Building wealth through housing may be unattainable, but it’s being replaced by a search for a new American dream: self-actualization.

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