The first full year of the COVID-19 pandemic caused the Democrat-run city of Los Angeles to lose 176,000 people from its population from mid-2020 to mid-2021, the second-largest drop in the United States.
New York lost the most residents (328,000), U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday showed, according to LA's KABC-7.
Births outnumbered deaths in Los Angeles, and while there was an increase in the immigrant population, those figures could not overcome all the people fleeing the city.
LA.'s regional population stands at 12.9 million residents, according to the report.
When taking Long Beach and Anaheim into consideration, the region has lost almost 205,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday.
The largest metropolitan net domestic migration losses:
- New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ- (385,455).
- Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA (204,776).
- San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA (128,870).
- Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI (106,897).
LA County, California, experienced the greatest net domestic migration loss overall from 2020 to 2021 (179,757 residents), followed by New York County, New York, (113,642), according to the bureau's press release.
"The patterns we've observed in domestic migration shifted in 2021," the Census Bureau Population Division's Dr. Christine Hartley wrote in a statement. "Even though over time we've seen a higher number of counties with natural decrease and net international migration continuing to decline, in the past year, the contribution of domestic migration counteracted these trends so there were actually more counties growing than losing population."
The largest increase came in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Collin County, Texas. Maricopa County gained 58,246, and Collin County gained 36,313.
Brookings Institution demographer William Frey suggested the migration from large cities is going to be temporary.
"There is clearly a dispersion, but I think it's a blip," Frey told The Associated Press. "We're at one of the lowest levels of immigration in a long, long time, and that affects big metros like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. That is going to come back. With the natural decrease, we will go back to normal."
Information from the AP was used in this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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