Population slightly down in MA 2022 (Boston, Florida: to buy, places to live, price)

[ben young]

Originally Posted by timberline742

Most people here seem to consider anything west of Worcester the boonies and western mass.

Most people on CD.Ma.think anything or anyone outside 495 as a Hick living on a farm ..
I'm a Coos County NH resident with property in Mass

[bostongymjunkie]

Related:

"Boston.com readers want to relocate. Here’s where they plan to settle."

https://www.boston.com/community/rea...1=hp_secondary

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by ben young

Most people on CD.Ma.think anything or anyone outside 495 as a Hick living on a farm ..
I'm a Coos County NH resident with property in Mass

So a hick living on a farm?

[BostonBornMassMade]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/states-...outh-carolina/

Massachusetts had a domestic migration loss of 57,292 in 2022 according to an analysis of census data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

This is 4th-worst per capita after New York, California, and Louisiana.

[yesmaybe]

Originally Posted by BostonBornMassMade

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/states-...outh-carolina/

Massachusetts had a domestic migration loss of 57,292 in 2022 according to an analysis of census data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

This is 4th-worst per capita after New York, California, and Louisiana.

If you look at the raw numbers though, the population loss in MA is coming from the boonies (Worcester/Springfield and parts west). So it's NBD. Boston area was about flat.

[BostonBornMassMade]

‘People are leaving’: Massachusetts has lost 110,000 residents since COVID began. Is life better out there?
Citing housing costs and remote work, among other factors, 110,000 more people have moved out of Massachusetts than moved in since the start of COVID.

Sometimes, Amanda Hitchins looks out her window in Minnesota and thinks about her “forever home,” back in Massachusetts.

When Hitchins and her husband, Michael, bought a house in North Reading in 2017, the Andover native assumed she’d spend her life there. Then her father died and her mother was diagnosed with dementia and needed to move in with them.

The troubles didn’t stop there. The pandemic hit. Hitchens was furloughed from her job as a speech therapist, and her husband’s job went fully remote. Then they discovered that building a basement apartment for her mom was going to cost more than they could comfortably afford.

The couple looked hard at their options: They’d need a home equity loan and two full-time jobs to pay for the renovation. Hitchins’s job was still in limbo and it had become clear her husband could work from anywhere.

“We had two kids, student loans — the usual — and property taxes in North Reading were bonkers,” said Hitchins, 40. “We were jumping hurdles that we didn’t need to jump.”

So they left, joining a growing exodus of people who have pulled up stakes from Massachusetts since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2021 through July 2022, some 57,000 more people moved out of the state than into it, one of the highest rates of so-called domestic outmigration in the country. Go back to April 2020, and that number tops 110,000.

“It’s pretty jaw-dropping,” said Mark Melnik, the director of economic and policy research at the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute. These trends, coupled with the aging of the baby boomers, he said, could make it progressively harder for employers to fill jobs.

People have always come and gone, of course, especially in a region with a huge annual influx and exodus of college students. And both births and immigration from abroad have replaced many of those who moved away. But after years of steady growth, and a peak of 7 million residents at the start of this decade, Massachusetts has seen its population shrink for the last three years, down about 50,000 people in all. (Boston, too, saw its population dip in the first year of the pandemic, though 2022 figures are not yet available.)

It also shows significant population in Greater Boston- with every zip code in Boston itself showing more outbound moves than inbound moves since 2020. (even west Roxbury)

Top Outflow the States from Massachusetts Source

New Hampshire 20,046
Florida 19,019
California 11.116
New York 10,876
Rhode Island 10,448
Connecticut 9,201
Texas 6,269
Maine 6,195
North Carolina 5,447
Pennsylvania 4,629

[BostonBornMassMade]

Originally Posted by yesmaybe

If you look at the raw numbers though, the population loss in MA is coming from the boonies (Worcester/Springfield and parts west). So it's NBD. Boston area was about flat.

Not true until you get outside 128.

ZIP codes in Greater Boston saw more people leaving than moving in

[BostonBornMassMade]

Some rougher quotes ...

She said she misses her old home, but feels more financially secure in her new one. The smaller mortgage and lower taxes mean she can work part time, and the family still had enough left over to get out of the cold and take a vacation to Disney World last winter. And she has more time to devote to her volunteer work abroad in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“We have that padding,” she said. “Everybody I know in Massachusetts that’s doing fine has a running car and heat and pays the bills, but you’re never more than a couple paychecks away from being like: ‘Hmm, how are we going to do this?’ That’s life in Massachusetts.”

Thomas and his wife were forced to look farther and farther from the city — farther afield than they had intended — and bidding as much as $900,000, he said, while asking themselves if they even wanted the houses they were trying to buy.

”We’d convinced ourselves that was what we should do,” he said.

But gradually, they realized, maybe it wasn’t. The pandemic had loosened the Thomases’ ties here; the social networks they relied on had unraveled and they weren’t seeing his parents on the Cape as much. It became easier to envision life somewhere else, like North Carolina, where Thomas’s in-laws now live.

And when they started looking at houses in Greater Raleigh, what they saw was bigger and cheaper, with amenities he couldn’t imagine here. Now the family lives in a neighborhood with a golf course for less than they paid to rent in Charlestown.

But despite the community she’s created, Wirkkala, at 61, is leaving Massachusetts next month. She just can’t afford it: She has fewer students than before COVID. Now she’s behind on the rent for her shop and has relied on renters’ assistance to pay for her home.

“I’m going into debt every month that I’m here,” she said. “I have no extra money and I’m tired of living that way.”

There are a lot of women Wirkkala’s age in a similar situation. Researchers at the Gerontology Institute at UMass Boston recently found that 64 percent of single women 65 and older here experience economic insecurity, the highest rate of any state in the country. She used to be a homeowner, until she and her husband divorced and sold their house in Arlington in 2006. It last sold in 2019 for $1 million, three times what they paid for it two decades before.

“I could never own a home here again,” Wirkkala said.

Gallagan was struck, visiting his wife’s home state of Ohio in 2021, that while most of his friends from his hometown of Westford now live all over Massachusetts — “basically wherever they got an offer accepted on a house” — hers all live about 20 minutes apart and hang out regularly.

Eventually he started looking at jobs in Columbus and found one quickly. They moved in October of 2021. Gallagan’s adjusting to Midwest living, he said, but “I wish I didn’t have to leave.”


Unquestionably, stratospheric housing costs are a major factor in why people leave Massachusetts, especially now. Before the pandemic, a family making $100,000 a year could afford to buy 37 percent of homes available in the state. Today that figure is just 12 percent. In metro Boston, it’s just 6 percent, compared with 34 percent nationally.

[masssachoicetts]

I cant afford to buy a single home in my area of NJ and I make $85,000 a year, combined income of $143,000. I see a home for 400k, but the taxes are 13k a year. i dont get it.

Im sure MA is even worse.

[ben young]

Perhaps Goffd, my "farm" of +1500 acres with a Pvt.Airfield.
Sorry I didn't reply sooner , I have been in Sweden.