The big population shifts toward the South and inland West over the past few years have been attributed to many factors, from lower taxes and more permissive pandemic policies to better weather and fear of crime.
There’s surely something to all of these explanations, but they only take you so far. The pandemic policy differences have pretty much vanished; violent crime is generally worse in the South than in other parts of the country; the tax advantages to moving across state lines accrue mostly to those with very high incomes, who make up only a small percentage of the movers; and people clearly aren’t being lured from California to Texas by the weather.
Meanwhile, there is another explanation that largely holds up across the board. It’s that local governments in the South and inland West — what the U.S. Census Bureau calls the Mountain division — are building lots of new houses and apartments for people to move into. In April 2020, these regions were home to 45.6% of 331.4 million U.S. residents, a share that had risen to 46.3% by mid-2022. From 2020 through 2022, they accounted for 65.8% of new housing construction.
