Turn the lights out when you leave...

Source: Forbes, Jenna Goudreau (12/08/2010) - Using data from Moody’s Economy.com, Forbes identified the top-10 states where more residents are leaving than arriving.

The factors that encourage outbound migration from these states are mostly economic — high employment and high cost of living — although both Louisiana and Mississippi have been affected by natural disasters.

The 10 states that have said goodbye to the most residents are:

1. New York
2. Illinois
3. Ohio
4. Nebraska
5. Kansas
6. Iowa
7. Louisiana
8. North Dakota
9. South Dakota
10. Mississippi

I’m amazed that Michigan is not on this list, with all of economic turmoil that we’ve had and with unemployment still running above 12%. An article in the Sunday paper (12/19 Detroit Free Press) stated that local demographers expect that Michigan will end up right below 10 Million people when the 2010 census data is all counted. That will keep the state in the Top-10 for population, but just barely above Georgia and North Carolina.

As one would expect, except for Mississippi and Louisiana, which both suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, all of the population losing states are in colder climates or places with cold, snowy winters.

I wonder what this loss of population does to the local housing markets? In the distant past whole towns used to turn into ghost towns (The ghost town of Bodie California is pictured from WikiPedia) when the mines played out or whatever other local employment dried up. That doesn’t really happen any more, since people are more mobile and able to drive to jobs that would have been impractical in the horse and buggy days. Still, there have to be towns dotting the countryside that are mere shadows of their former glory days, before the big employer left town. That would make an interesting story for someone to research a dreport upon.