How the Midwest Became the Place to Move

One of the first known uses of the term flyover country in print came from a midwesterner: In a 1980 issue of Esquire magazine, Thomas McGuane—a native of Michigan—quipped, “Because we live in flyover country, we try to figure out what is going on elsewhere by subscribing to magazines.” For years, much of the Midwest has been dismissed as boring, forgettable, nice but way too cold. Since practically the invention of air-conditioning, Americans have been leaving snowy northern states for warm places such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona—a trend that accelerated rapidly during the coronavirus pandemic. But these days, people are no longer flying over the Midwest. In growing numbers, they’re flying to the Midwest, to find a place to live. In the past couple of years, the region has become a popular place to relocate; three of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas are there. Population growth in the Sun Belt, meanwhile, is slowing. The forces driving these changes go two ways: People are being drawn to more northerly cities for job opportunities and affordable housing, and they are being pushed out of the Sun Belt by the rising cost of living there. According to migration data, the cool thing to do now is put on your parka and move to the Midwest. Rockford, Illinois, a 150,000-person town an hour and 30 minutes from Chicago, was the most popular city for home shoppers last year, according to a Zillow algorithm that tracks home-value growth, how quickly houses sell, how many people from outside a given city are searching for homes there, and other factors. Dearborn, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, made Zillow’s top five. According to United Van Lines, one of the most popular states for inbound movers in 2025 was Minnesota; the state gained more people than it lost that year for the first time since 2017. Last year, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that several midwestern states, including Missouri, Indiana, and Wisconsin, switched from losing residents before the pandemic to gaining residents after it. [Read: The whole country is starting to look like California] Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, told me that according to company data, searches have increased for homes in several cities in the Midwest and upstate New York. These are the kinds of places, she said, that “people didn’t move into pre-pandemic or during the pandemic.” The company’s data also show that, compared with 2022, more people now are moving to Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Albany, and South Bend, Indiana. (Fairweather herself moved to Wisconsin from Seattle a few years ago.) Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, told me that Columbus and Indianapolis are also popping up as affordable cities attracting newcomers. Meanwhile, record numbers of people are leaving cities in the Sun Belt—a region that includes much of the southern United States. Austin, Fort Lauderdale, San Antonio, and Miami are now the slowest housing markets in the U.S., and a recent Redfin analysis found that Tampa, Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, and Miami had the nation’s greatest slowdowns in domestic migration in 2024. Previously in-demand cities such as Miami, Austin, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tampa were all “buyer’s markets” as of last summer—meaning the supply of homes for sale outpaced demand. A February analysis by the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey found that domestic migration to the South peaked in 2021–22 and then declined sharply. The primary force compelling people to choose hot dish and snow over tacos and sunshine is the housing market. Because of high interest rates and high prices, houses in the United States are less affordable than at almost any time in recent memory. The pandemic’s influx of Sun Belt newcomers drove up real-estate prices. Home building in supposedly “easy-to-build” places such as Dallas and Phoenix has slowed in recent years, making inexpensive homes even scarcer, according to a recent report co-authored by Glaeser. Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me that “the promise of the Sun Belt has often been more affordability and economic opportunity. But as that wanes, that could discourage people.” The Midwest, however, contains some of the last places in the U.S. where a three-bedroom house can be purchased for about $300,000, Fairweather said. Or, as Mark Partridge, a regional economist at Ohio State University, told me, maybe even less: “In a place like Toledo or Akron or Cleveland, you can get a really nice house for $200,000.” Particularly attractive are towns that are near a big city but have much smaller price tags. Take Rockford, the most popular housing market from the Zillow report. Although it’s within easy driving distance of Chicago, the average home value is about $170,000, to Chicago’s $300,000. A hybrid worker could conceivably work from Chicago a day or two a week while paying much less for a house than if they lived in the city. The same goes for Milwaukee, which is also an hour and a half from Chicago. As more people have moved there, midwestern home values have also risen: Rockford’s home prices are up nearly 10 percent year over year, compared with 3.9 percent in 2020, for example. But because they started at a much lower price point, these homes still seem affordable compared with houses in, say, Miami or Austin. In addition to proximity to a large city, what distinguishes bright spots such as Columbus and Indianapolis from less desirable midwestern cities is the availability of good-paying jobs. After all, few people can buy a house, even for $300,000, if they can’t find work nearby. According to OSU’s Partridge, the midwestern cities that were less reliant on manufacturing in the 1950s are the ones doing well now. These places were never dependent on factory jobs, so they were better able to weather the steep decline in U.S. manufacturing that began decades ago. “Because they had a more service-oriented composition of businesses, they did much better,” Partridge said. Today, these cities offer plentiful finance, tech, and health-care jobs. JPMorganChase employs 18,000 people in Columbus, for example; the pharmaceutical company Lilly is headquartered in Indianapolis. [Read: The disappearing American mortgage] These cities do lack one thing that the Sun Belt has in spades: sun. Perusing Redfin recently, I clicked on a house in Milwaukee, scrolled down to a feature on the site that measures sunlight, and saw that it gets all of 3.3 hours of daily “solar exposure” in December. “We still have crappy weather,” Partridge acknowledged, but “for certain kinds of people, it’s a great lifestyle.” That lifestyle includes sledding and snow pants and, yes, maybe some vitamin-D gummies. But perhaps this historically terrible housing market is enough to make people come to peace with being cold for a little while.