New survey debunks myth about migration out of Minneapolis

The prevailing anecdote in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest following George Floyd’s murder was that droves of people moved out of Minneapolis. But it wasn’t true.

According to new data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, some people did move, but not at a rate exceeding what had been typical before the pandemic.

“It is one of those things where it’s like the data and the narrative are just not in sync with each other,” said Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne.

These new insights come from a representative sample survey of all people in the United States who have a Social Security number and a credit file, compiled by the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel.

The data offer the most detailed look into migration in the Twin Cities, particularly during years when both U.S. Census and Metropolitan Council estimates indicated population growth slowed in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, or even the possibility that both cities had lost residents.

It was also during a time when the pandemic increased the number of people working from home, prompting interest in more spacious homes with an extra room to serve as an office. And five days of protests following the murder of George Floyd evolved into riots, causing an estimated $500 million in damage to buildings, especially in parts of Minneapolis.

The city saw some of its highest violent crime rates in the year that followed. As of May, there were more than 70 unsolved homicides from between 2020 and 2022, according to police records analyzed by the Star Tribune.

Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison said North Side neighborhoods have been saddled with negative narratives even before 2020, and that this look into movement patterns is a valuable resource that people can point to when they’re confronted with flawed perceptions of the city.

Payne agreed that this data helps bust the myth that people abandoned Minneapolis, but that anyone who frequents downtown likely never believed it.

There’s other evidence that refutes the mass exodus. Renters signed leases on 4,800 apartments in the first half of 2024 — the most in a decade. And downtown events, from last year’s Taylor Swift concert to this year’s whirlwind month that included Olympic Trials, Taste of Minnesota and the Pride Parade, are bringing people to the city.

The Federal Reserve data shows that the majority of people — about 64% — who were living in Minneapolis in 2020 were still in the same place by 2023. That was just one percentage point lower than the share who stayed put between 2016 and 2019.

Even Minneapolis residents who moved between 2020 and 2023 often didn’t go far. Of the people who did move, nearly 37% went to southwest Minneapolis or the Nokomis, Powderhorn or Northeast neighborhoods. Also, a larger share of the people moving into Minneapolis were coming from St. Paul than what the survey found for the three-year period before 2020.

Once remote and hybrid work became common, Payne said he saw residents increasingly value walkable commercial neighborhoods near downtown. Those enclaves already existed near downtown in 2020, which Payne said helped the city maintain a lot of its population.

“If you want to go get a coffee really quickly in between your Zoom calls, you have the opportunity in a lot of our communities.” Payne said, “That’s something that I think is a structural shift to the way that we work and … I think that’s another reason why Minneapolis has been so strong.”

The new data has limitations. People without credit scores or Social Security numbers weren’t included, reducing the representation of people younger than 25, those with low incomes and immigrants.

The Federal Reserve’s findings make it possible to see if there are variations in migration patterns depending on a person’s credit score. For example, those with high scores — above 750 — were most likely to stay in the metro and least likely to move to Greater Minnesota.

Among those living anywhere in the Twin Cities metro area, which is defined as a 16-county area, in 2020 just 1.8% left for Greater Minnesota by 2023, a number that is unchanged from the three-year period right before the pandemic.

Minnesota State Demographer Susan Brower said she doesn’t hear about people moving out of Minneapolis or St. Paul when she’s spending time in the metro area, but the topic comes up when she’s in other parts of the state.

“People in Greater Minnesota really do have stories about people moving to Greater Minnesota, either for the first time or returning to Greater Minnesota from the Twin Cities because of the pandemic,” Brower said, “This data source challenges some of the stories that we have about our own migration patterns here in Minnesota and, in another way, can support what we know to be true.”

These false notions can partly be attributed to years of using population data to interpret migration.

Ben Horowitz, senior policy analyst at the Minneapolis Fed, said it’s tough to nail down exactly why a population count changes year over year, and it doesn’t tell us where people are going. Population can change due to many factors beyond migration, such as birth rates rising or falling, young people moving out on their own, or higher-than-usual death rates. This makes it easy to misinterpret.

And while it takes more than a few extra numbers to break down years of misconceptions, Ellison said these findings matter to the people who have stayed in Minneapolis.

“At minimum, it’s validating,” Ellison said. “And that matters to a city and to a population of people when there has been a considerable effort to demoralize us.”