I’m just sitting here waiting for the Census data.
Garima Vyas always wanted to live in a big city. She thought about New York, long the destination for 20-something strivers, but was wary of the cost and complicated subway lines.
So Vyas picked another metropolis that’s increasingly become young people’s next-best option — Houston.
Now 34, Vyas, a tech worker, has lived in Houston since 2013. “I knew I didn’t like New York, so this was the next best thing,” Vyas said. “There are a lot of things you want to try when you are younger — you want to try new things. Houston gives you that, whether it’s food, people or dating. And it’s cheap to live in.”
The choices by Vyas and other members of the millennial generation of where to live have reshaped the country’s political geography over the past decade. They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.
The U.S. Census Bureau this coming week is expected to formally tally this change by releasing its count of population shifts in the once-a-decade reallocation of congressional seats. It’s is expected to lead to the Sun Belt gaining seats at the expense of states in the north.
Most projections have Texas gaining three seats, Florida two and Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon one each. Expected to lose seats are Alabama, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia — and California.
The relocations have reshuffled politics. Once solidly conservative places such as Texas have seen increasingly large islands of liberalism sprout in their cities, driven by the migration of younger adults, who lean Democratic. Since 2010, the 20-34-year-old population has increased by 24% in San Antonio, 22% in Austin and 19% in Houston, according to an Associated Press analysis of American Community Survey data. In November’s election, two states that also saw sharp growth in young people in their largest cities — Arizona and Georgia — flipped Democratic in the presidential contest.
These demographic winners are almost all in the Sun Belt, but climate is not the only thing they have in common.
“These places are growing not just because they’re warmer, it’s because that’s where the jobs are and young people are moving there,” said Ryan Wiechelt, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
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Welcome to Houston, but I have to ask – you thought the subway system was confusing? I figured it out as a high school freshman, but to each their own. It’s an interesting read, and there’s a lot to think about in terms of how voting patterns have changed and what the near-term future trends look like, but let’s keep a couple of things in mind. One is that a big part of the shift in 2018 and 2020 was higher-income college-educated white people who had been living here changing their votes. You don’t see the kind of dramatic and fast shift in CD07 and HD134 without that. Indeed, there was polling evidence following the 2018 election to suggest that native Texans voted for Beto O’Rourke at a higher rate than people who moved to Texas did. That’s just one data point, and it doesn’t negate the observation that young newcomers have greatly shifted the center of political gravity in the big urban areas like greater Houston. Two, for what it’s worth home prices in Texas in general and in the Houston area in particular have been rising sharply of late. We’re still a cheaper place to live than New York or California, but there are no inexpensive homes to be had in a lot of neighborhoods.
The story also touches on the state politics in places like Texas and Florida, which are well out of step not just with younger people in general, but on some key issues with the public as a whole. I don’t know if that might make Texas in particular less attractive to these folks, but this is one big reason why there’s been a lot of corporate pushback to voter suppression and anti-trans legislation – the companies want to make sure they can get the workers they want, and those workers don’t want to live places that they see as backwards and repressive. There’s a lot in tension, and something will have to give sooner or later. I know what outcome I’m hoping for, but it’s not going to happen by itself.
(Note: This is an older story that I had in my drafts and hadn’t gotten around to publishing just yet. We of course now have the apportionment data. Doesn’t change the thesis of this article, but since the timing was mentioned, I wanted to clarify.)