Will migration to Minnesota’s rural areas continue post-pandemic?

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Sarah Dornink had thought for a while about moving to a rural area, but her family didn’t actually do it until the pandemic when they traded in the Twin Cities suburb of Fridley for the rolling hills and valleys of southeast Minnesota.

“Our daughter turned 4,” she said. “We had to start thinking about school districts. And we wanted a little land to call our own.”

When her employer made telecommuting a permanent option, they made the leap. “Now we’re in Harmony and love it,” she said.

For decades, the narrative around population change in Minnesota has been that people leave rural areas and move to urban ones, the great “brain drain” that has caused so much angst among rural residents and officials.

That was mostly true until about 2015 when people in many rural towns around the state started noticing something different: There seemed to be more new people around.

Turns out, it wasn’t their imaginations. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirm that something strange, something counter to the standard narrative, was going on even before the pandemic and accelerated during it.

Every year, we at the Center for Rural Policy and Development track population, migration and economic trends throughout rural Minnesota. Most of the time, the updates I make are minor. These kinds of trends tend to change slowly. But every once in a while, some large event occurs that knocks these slow-changing trends sideways or intensifies them. The pandemic was one such event.

During the pandemic, net migration to Hennepin and Ramsey counties took a huge hit. In greater Minnesota, though, net migration stayed positive and even accelerated, including in the most rural regions of the state.

Now, it’s important to understand that net migration is the net sum of people leaving and coming into an area. If more people move into an area than leave it, then it’s a positive net migration. So, with this data we can’t actually conclude that people were “fleeing” the inner urban areas for the suburbs and rural areas because of, fill in the blank here: the pandemic, crime, cost of living, etc. Drawing this conclusion only muddies the narrative and ignores two main facts.

First, using data from the New York Fed, the extreme negative net migration that happened in Ramsey and Hennepin counties during the pandemic was driven largely by folks not moving into those counties rather than a significant increase in residents leaving them. Yes, the rate of people moving out compared with previous years did increase slightly during the pandemic, but much more significant was the lower number of people who moved into those counties in 2020 and 2021.

Second, the pandemic only intensified the net migration trends that were already in place. So the question isn’t whether migration trends changed because of the pandemic, but rather if the pandemic just sharpened the direction they were already going for a bit and will they ultimately go back to what they were before: a slow-moving upward trend for greater Minnesota and the suburbs and a modest negative trend for Hennepin and Ramsey counties.

Researchers think of population migration in terms of push-and-pull factors that may “push” a family out of one community or “pull” them toward another. These forces can be different depending on a person’s priorities at that particular time of life. For someone in their 20s, they might feel a strong pull to the location of a college, their first career opportunity, or an exciting, youthful nightlife. As they get older, a house, a school district and day care availability might be more important.

Examples of this weighing of options are everywhere in my small town of New London in central Minnesota.

Being closer to grandparents at the beginning of parenthood was important for my friend Todd Anderson, who is from Kandiyohi County originally. He and his wife met in the Twin Cities when they were going to college and started their careers there. They then moved to Colorado Springs to experience life in the mountains. Having their first baby brought them back to Minnesota, and to New London in particular.

After a long-distance relationship between the Twin Cities and a small Minnesota town, musicians Jonny Hunter and Brooke Eischens decided to settle down here as well. What they gave up in quantity of potential gigs in the Twin Cities was made up for by finding an affordable house on the river, a school district they liked for their children and a slower pace of life. An added bonus is that after a few years, they have more gigs than ever. Turns out this area is very musician-friendly.

And Nic Kuehnast recently moved here from Denver to get away from rising crime and high housing costs. “My wife got pregnant, and we decided it was time to make the move,” he said.

Their moves were all a part of a long-term in-migration of individuals and families into rural areas as they reach their 30s and start having children, a trend that’s well documented by University of Minnesota Extension researcher Ben Winchester. This trend may not always make up for the loss of 18- to 29-year-olds from rural areas, but it was a formidable trend for many years. When U researchers interviewed and surveyed newcomers to rural Minnesota, the top pull factors were affordable housing, small class sizes and quality of life. The exact reasons my friends — and even my wife and I — chose to live rural.

This trend did slow down once the Great Recession hit, just as the second largest generation in America, the millennials, were turning 30. The crashing housing market, increased debt held by younger generations, high unemployment and the uncertainty in the market caused many households to hunker down and not make any sudden moves, particularly to rural areas.

Perhaps because of these economic circumstances, this generation has been approaching life a bit differently. They are having children later, if at all. They have significantly more college debt, and their careers are much more likely to be in industries that are concentrated in urban areas. These are all factors that may create a preference for cities and suburbs — higher debt loads often push people to find higher-paying jobs, not having children means your housing preferences don’t have to be child-friendly, and having children later may mean an individual is more career-oriented and will want to work in a field only found in urban areas.

Some of us who watch these trends began wondering out loud: Do millennials just prefer multifamily housing and urban amenities? But after the Great Recession subsided and the economy began to recover, the push-and-pull factors favoring rural life started kicking in again for a number of people. For many reasons, since the mid-2010s, the factors that would push people away from rural areas decreased while the factors that would pull people in that direction increased.

The investments in broadband across rural Minnesota are paying off, so telecommuting is a real possibility now in most places. Although housing prices have increased in rural areas, they are still significantly lower than in urban areas. For the price of a condo in Minneapolis, you can get a nice home with some acreage in rural Minnesota. The schools are back to normal and continue to be small, an important desire for some parents who feel their children might need extra attention from teachers after “the lost year” of the pandemic. Rural communities continue to be safe while Minneapolis and St. Paul are still plagued with narratives and perceptions, whether accurate or not, of increased violence. Lastly, jobs are actually plentiful, yes, even high-paying professional jobs, in rural regions due to continued economic growth and an aging population leaving the workforce.

This just scratches the surface of what pushes or pulls a person or a family to leave one place for another, and it’s only looking at one generation. Recent retirees are probably weighing their own set of push-and-pull factors, and those could look quite different.

And while it’s tempting, we shouldn’t think of this shift in population as one region being better than the other. Minnesota’s smallest communities are still facing an uphill battle to provide enough housing, day care openings and broadband.

Instead, it’s just another of many shifts in migration at particular points in time when one region’s characteristics suited people’s needs better than others. The farm crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, the Industrial Revolution and even the G.I. Bill were all events that pushed and pulled people around Minnesota and beyond.

So will this trend continue? The data and research indicate it’s possible rural areas will continue on this positive trajectory, though not as sharply as during the pandemic. But it’s still early. Only time will tell if these trends in the flow of people will continue. But for now, rural Minnesota is wide open.

Kelly Asche is a senior researcher for the Mankato-based Center for Rural Policy and Development. He lives in New London, Minn.