Americans are moving to smaller towns in the South

“Keeping Austin weird” has been more of a slog than locals anticipated. Inundated with Silicon Valley refugees and Manhattan defectors, the Texan city once known for its cool subculture has become a tech metropolis. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Tesla set up shop there, offering jobs that made it a magnet. From 2010 to 2020 metropolitan Austin’s population grew by more than that of any other big city, by one-third to 2.3m.

It has since burst at the seams. Housing supply has failed to keep up with rocketing demand. In September the Austin Board of Realtors said the city is short of 152,000 affordable two-person homes. Locals are getting priced out, homeless people line the downtown streets and traffic is hellish.

Cities across the Sun Belt, from Charlotte to Dallas, have seen an influx of newcomers over the past decade. Dubbed the “new great migration”, it has been led by thousands of black college graduates moving south, fuelling urban renewal in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, even as cities in the north-east, Midwest and west shrink. And small southern towns are growing fastest.

Some of that is because of a thirst for small-town living and an ability to work remotely, brought on by the pandemic. In 2020 more people moved to places with fewer than 30,000 residents than to ones with more than 80,000. Even after mask mandates eased, the trend continued. Census counts up to July 2022 show that small metro areas in the South saw 0.9 new arrivals per 100 residents, while southern cities had just 0.6.

Daphne, Alabama, a fishing town on the Gulf coast, fared better than Birmingham, a city whose population did not budge. Spartanburg, South Carolina, had twice the in-migration rate of much larger Charleston.

This trend will continue in 2024. In 2020 the local council of a cluster of 31 mid-sized towns in the Ozark mountains of north-west Arkansas offered movers $10,000 and a bicycle. Now they no longer need incentives. At the current migration rate, the area is projected to double in size, hitting 1m residents by 2045. The towns are creating a more cosmopolitan feel by building hotels and transport services. In September the council was advertising 11,000 new jobs. A golden age for hamlets of the South is coming.■

Rebecca Jackson, Southern correspondent, The Economist, Austin