Hello, Miami! How a year's upheaval inspired new patterns of job migration

Fourteen months ago, Miami mayor Francis Suarez declared that his Florida city “is morphing into a real player,” in terms of building a world-class ecosystem of tech and financial talent. Back then, his boast might have seemed laughable.??

Not anymore.?

All sorts of achievers in finance keep moving to the Miami metro area, uprooting themselves from cities such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston. South Florida’s bustling city is where the jobs are now. Announcements keep coming, month after month, as global financial heavyweights such as Blackstone and the Millennium hedge-fund group build out their Miami presences.?

Over the past two years, the U.S. heat map for careers has been redefined in a big way. Some renowned job-magnet cities have lost their allure, while unexpected rivals have taken their place. It’s all part of the way people are rethinking their geographic choices as the COVID-19 pandemic and assorted social restrictions play out.??

For a comprehensive look at which metro areas are benefiting (or suffering), fresh data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team puts everything into perspective.

As the chart above shows, Miami and a flurry of other Sunbelt destinations are briskly gaining favor. So far in 2021, four of the fast-gaining talent magnets are metro areas in Florida. Another three are in Texas, with single cities in California, Colorado, Tennessee, Utah and Georgia rounding out the list.

In recent months, Bloomberg’s wealth reporters have gleefully chronicled Florida’s emergence as a sunnier version of New York City, down to the most striking details. As they put it in a September feature, “the Covid-19 pandemic supercharged a migration of Manhattan elite — fueling a surge in the region’s luxury real estate, golf-club memberships and private-school enrollments.”?

Ramble through the Miami-West Palm Beach metro area, and you'll now find a Harry’s Bar that closely matches Manhattan’s long-time favorite. Need a doctor? Well-known New York medical establishments such as NYU Langone and Mount Sinai have set up Florida’s outposts. Even Florida’s elite private schools are making adjustments that help transplanted New Yorkers feel at home.???

Turning to other cities, U.S. government data shows that Austin, which now has more than 1 million residents within city limits alone, added 18,000 jobs in October for the overall metro region. Tech companies such as Apple, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard have been hiring briskly. Meanwhile, Austin's growth feeds on itself, as inward migration creates more demand for teachers, restaurant workers and all the other needs of an expanding metropolis.

“In terms of the economy, the pandemic is essentially over" in the Austin area, economist Jon Hockenyos recently told the Austin American-Statesman. Local unemployment stands at just 3.4%, and talk of staffing shortages is rife.

As newcomers flock to economically strong cities, all that inward migration tends to push up housing prices. Data from realtor.com shows that median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Austin has risen 26% in the past year.

Housing costs in most of the other talent-magnet metros have spiked by comparable amounts. Jacksonville, Fla., has seen the steepest rent increase for 1BR apartments (39%) in the top-12 list, according to realtor.com. San Antonio’s increase (17%) is the mildest of the bunch; the rest all are at 20% or higher.

It’s a different story, not surprisingly, in cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, where the net population outflows of the first year of the pandemic still haven’t fully reversed themselves. Rents for a 1BR apartment have declined 8% in New York; they’re up just 3.1% in Chicago and 5.5% in the San Francisco metro area.

Is there anywhere where talent migration trends are improving -- and housing costs aren’t rising in ways that make it hard for newcomers to maintain their standard of living? There’s a small but intriguing set of metro areas where talent outflows are still an issue, but people aren’t in as much of a hurry to leave as they used to be.?

From an optimist’s point of view, the economic difficulties of such metro areas might be bottoming out, in a way that could eventually translate into job growth. One such example is Hartford, Conn., where the city’s inflow-to-outflow ratio remains below the breakeven level, but it’s still 8.7 percentage points better than it was a year earlier.

Other metro areas in this category of (potential) rebounds in the making include Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Housing costs there tend to be a lot lower than in the costliest coastal cities. But rents there are inching up, too, by amounts ranging from 4% to 13%.

Methodology

A migration instance is defined as a member changing their location on their LinkedIn profile. This analysis examines changes in the inflow-outflow ratio (number of inflows to a market area for every outflow) for the November 2020 to October 2021 period, versus the same interval a year earlier. The rankings cover metro areas with net inflows this year, and a minimum of 500 monthly moves in this year’s period..

LinkedIn data scientists Cristian Jara-Figueroa and Brian Xu contributed to this article.