Chicago net migration trends and investor outlook

[Ryan Bird]

I saw an Year end report that talks about negative net migration trend in cook county and especially in the city of Chicago. I’m curious how investors take these numbers. I see such articles on negative net migration starting from 2017 so believe it’s nothing new. Some of the real estate “investing lessons/podcasts” tells me to look at migration /population growth and find cities with positive growth.

Does net migration trend really matters? Curious to see why should someone invest in Chicago even with negative net migration numbers?

[Bob Floss II]

This again? January of every year someone posts an article about how Illinois and Chicago are losing population. I did a deep dive back in 2018 and found some data comes from the census, but most of the data of population movement comes from moving companies. When I looked further, the same data showed Illinois had a medium or high level of outbound population since 1977. Chicago couldn't possibly maintain status as the third most populated city in the US if we have experienced population loss for 45 straight years. The data fails to account for undocumented inbound movement that is not tracked by census or moving companies.

We have arguably nine major universities, a couple dozen local community colleges, eleven medical schools, seven law schools, and eleven theology schools that attract tens of thousands of students every year that don't use movers for their mini fridge and futon. The data also reflected almost no movement in or out of Illinois for anyone under an income level of $49,000. Around 45% of those tracked in the data made over $150,000. Lower income, undocumented, or ESL population also have a track record of not participating in census data collection. Add all this up, and you end up with a huge gap of population movement unaccounted for and produces flawed results.