In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, as workplaces closed down and the nation shifted toward social isolation, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a new high in the number of people moving into Vermont.
Experts, policymakers and everyday Vermonters eyed the boom and wondered: Could this be the long-term antidote to Vermont’s aging and shrinking population? Or conversely, could it strain the state’s resources beyond what it is capable of handling?
Last month, the Census Bureau published its migration statistics for 2022. What the numbers show is that the second year of the pandemic marked a return to the more modest migration totals of the pre-pandemic years.
Among the early newcomers were Amy Allen and her family. Her late father-in-law lived in Maine, and she and her husband grew worried about him living alone after the onset of the pandemic. At one point, Allen’s husband drove 13 hours from the northern Virginia area to help his father after a health incident.
But they couldn’t convince him to come down to live with them. Instead, her family looked all across New England and settled on South Burlington as a combination of good schools, access to services and close proximity to an airport.
“Getting a New Englander out of New England is a hard thing,” she said.
The people VTDigger recently spoke with who moved to Vermont in the early years of the pandemic came from a variety of backgrounds and moved to Vermont for a variety of reasons, sometimes for multiple reasons at once.
At a national level, wanting cheaper, newer or better housing was a top reason cited for moving places, according to the Census Bureau. Family- and employment-related reasons were also common.
According to the Census state-to-state migration flows, about 26,000 people moved into Vermont between 2021 and 2022, while 23,000 moved away. That’s a net migration gain of just under 3,000 people, compared with a net gain of more than 14,000 people the year before.
The Vermont Office of the State Treasurer shared these figures recently, noting that the two years together marked a net population increase of around 17,500 — more than the previous decade combined.
But experts also cautioned that the Census data is plagued by a high error margin, so high it could almost erase the 2021 to 2022 total. That’s because the data is based on the American Community Survey, which interviews only 7,000 or so Vermont households each year. The estimated number of people who have moved to Vermont in the past year — and from what state — is extrapolated from that sample to the whole population.
Peter Nelson, a geographer at Middlebury College, said that despite the high error margin, it still makes sense that pandemic-era trends affected 2021 to 2022 data. But a primary one, the willingness for employers to allow remote work, has since started to shift the other way, he said.
“My casual observation, based on lived experience here, is that … the intensity of newcomers arriving in the area has slowed down a bit,” he said. “I think in part due to like, there’s no place for people that want to move here to live.”
Migrants from states near and far
Nelson added that the Census numbers also seem to align with other data sources on where people tend to come to Vermont from or to move to from Vermont.
In 2021 and 2022, Vermont reportedly gained the most newcomers from states like New Jersey and Massachusetts, while losing residents to New Hampshire, some Southern states like Florida and a few Western states like Utah.
Within the data, Nelson observed greater flows in and out of Vermont from its neighbors; places that have larger populations, like California; and states with established migration connections, like Florida, with its historic “snowbird” population.
Jen Beane-Edgar, originally from the coast of New Hampshire, came to Vermont in August 2020 to get out of what she called a toxic relationship that escalated during the early months of lockdown. She moved in with her parents in the Upper Valley region and was immediately impressed with the services available there.
“My youngest is profoundly autistic, and the resources that I’ve received here and the support for that are just amazing,” she said.
Beane-Edgar loves the beauty of Vermont, the lack of congestion and the friendliness of her neighbors, although she conceded that Vermonters keep to themselves a bit more at first and slowly warm up to people.
Are newcomers adding to the income gap?
Nelson, the Middlebury geographer, said that while the overall number of migrants may be small, he’s concerned about what the influx signifies about Vermont’s affordability and equity.
Data from 1040 tax forms, published by the Internal Revenue Services, shows that in 2021, people coming to Vermont had a higher per-capita income than people leaving. That’s a trend that’s been going on for years.
“I think the income gap between in-movers and out-movers leads to more acute economic inequalities amongst the population that’s here,” he said.
That’s not always the case, though. Some pandemic-era migrants have had struggles of their own with the cost of living in Vermont.
Steven Tanzi grew up in the Hudson Valley, went to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh across the lake from Vermont and took a job with the Radio Vermont Group after graduating.
He said via email he originally thought he’d be able to “survive” here on his salary offer, but “after moving and entering the ‘real world’ for the first time fully, I quickly realized I simply did not make enough money.”
He has worked a minimum of two jobs at a time to make ends meet. Housing costs are the main cause of his financial problems, he said.
“Rental apartments are overly expensive, making finding a place to live that is in good shape extremely hard,” Tanzi wrote.
Not all migrants have stayed
It’s impossible to say from the Census data how many people who moved to Vermont in 2021 have since left the state since the bureau doesn’t track individuals. At least one person VTDigger reached out to came to Vermont during the pandemic but then had to leave.
Linnea Paton and her partner live in Brooklyn, though she has long hoped to make the move up to Vermont. She loves hiking, swimming in lakes and having friends over at her home.
“The things that make me happy are hard to do in Brooklyn,” she said.
So during the pandemic, as their offices closed to in-person work, she said, “Why not now?”
The couple and their preschool-age child ended up staying in South Burlington for about a year and a half before their employers told them to come back. She has fond memories of specific hikes and places she found, like the Intervale in Burlington.
“There’s no end to the number of lovely places to discover in Vermont,” Paton said. The experience has only cemented Paton’s desire to move back again, permanently.
That is what Allen and her family plan to do, even though her father-in-law died in June.
“We were able to do everything possible for him those last couple of years, and that was totally worth it,” she said.
Her children have thrived since the move and enjoy their new school and outdoors programs, Allen said.
Allen’s advice to people who have just moved here? Join a community or hobby group as an easier way of meeting people. However, there have been a few difficulties adjusting to Vermont as a born and raised Texan, one that comes up specifically this time of year.
“I thought I could scrape by with cute shoes, and you can’t do that in the winter here,” she said.
