How Democratic Cities Can Win Back Residents

A mericans are moving out of big, blue cities.

This is not news. For years, people have been migrating out of high-tax, high-regulation cities and states in favor of low-tax, more business-friendly locales. Political and public-policy trends show the flow out of blue areas ends up in purple or red regions.

Are we going to give up and see our great cities perennially bleed residents? How can we come together to save the places we call home from that fate?

As a proud resident of Chicago — a city that just narrowly elected one of the most far-left mayors in the country — I’m proposing we blur the party lines and build around ideas that help cities thrive. There is a way forward for America’s big cities as well as the country as a whole. But it will require us to acknowledge some hard truths before we can get to work.

First, it’s important to examine why people are moving. From July 2021 to July 2022, the U.S. counties that lost the most residents to outmigration were Cook County, which encompasses Chicago, plus Los Angeles County and three major counties in New York City.

While there’s no single reason for these population losses, there are a few factors we can put in better context.

The first is Covid-19, at least as a proximate cause. In 2020 and 2021, as the country, especially left-leaning cities, enacted strict lockdowns and vaccine mandates, people began moving in record numbers to suburbs or states with less stringent restrictions. But Americans had been moving out of blue cities and states long before Covid. The pandemic didn’t create the exodus, it simply exacerbated it.

We can also discount the idea that more people simply want to live in the suburbs. More people are moving to the suburbs today than before the pandemic, but while the numbers fluctuate year to year, during the past decade, cities such as Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Jacksonville have consistently gained new residents. Plus, data show Americans still like living in big cities.

So if blue cities’ population losses aren’t purely because of Covid or people just being sick of the big-city hustle, what is the main cause?

One of the most consistent data threads for shrinking cities is how policies adopted in those cities have made them increasingly more expensive, unsafe, and unfriendly to business.

In a poll of 800 registered Chicago voters conducted by Echelon Insights for the Illinois Policy Institute, 34 percent of respondents said they wanted to leave the city and cited “taxes or affordability” and crime as the top reasons why. We’ve seen these sentiments reflected in elections. During the past two years, crime and the economy were the two biggest issues in both Chicago’s and New York’s mayoral elections. An outbreak of youth violence in Chicago in mid April likely would not have helped calm fears. A struggling public-education system is not providing an incentive to stay in the Windy City. Nearly 80 percent of Chicago eleventh-graders could not read or perform math at grade level, according to state data from 2022. Meanwhile, half of Chicago Public School System (CPS) students are chronically absent. Nearly 90,000 students have left the CPS, shrinking it by 20 percent since 2010 as families opt for private schools or flee the city entirely.

With a sixth major company, Guggenheim Partners, readying an expected move out of Chicago this year, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union leader, cannot spend his term ignoring the city’s perceived declining safety and attractiveness to job creators. And while Johnson ultimately prevailed in the 2023 mayoral race, he must remember that his win was not a landslide — nearly 48 percent of city voters did not favor his radical approach.

How We Can Come Back Together

Just as cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and my hometown of Chicago grew to be magnets for families, entrepreneurs, and Americans from all walks of life in the 20th century, they can do so again in the 21st century. The key will be to embrace a more moderate approach to public policy. That means refusing to give in to the extreme policies and ideologies that have gotten many major cities to this point.

New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams, while far from perfect, serves as an example of this concept.

Adams was elected as a moderate Democrat against a field of candidates who were pitching extreme ideas such as defunding the police, canceling rent, hiking taxes to pay for expensive entitlement programs, and much more. Adams won with a campaign promising to address crime and public safety, helping small businesses succeed, and embracing school-choice programs.

While Adams is still early in his administration, his approach to governance seems to be reducing violent crime in New York and has ushered in a new era of policy ideas and approaches in the Big Apple.

But reasonable and moderate elected leaders can only do so much. It takes residents willing to fight for change in their hometowns to bring it about. While no one can be faulted for moving out of a city for financial reasons or out of fear for their family’s safety, our great American cities will only improve if Americans are willing to stay and fight for their futures.

I truly believe this, which is why — even though I disagree with many of the policies my new mayor has promised to push for — my family is buying a home in Chicago. We’re dedicating ourselves to making our city better.

Americans are moving, and they have been for years now. But if our big-city leaders can listen to their residents’ needs and steer for the center rather than the fringes, I have faith that Americans will soon be moving back to our cities regardless of political hue.