The Midwestern Exodus Is Finally Ending

You're probably wondering if Chicago is experience the bump that Akron is? They are blessed with our outstanding public servants or massive public debt or out of control spending.

It turns out that the Windy City lost about 60,000 residents during the pandemic. Last year the bleeding stopped with the population remaining static*. That's largely due to new immigrants. So while the Midwest is coming back (largly due to spiraling home costs of alt options like Florida) Chicago remain mired in the mud. *Illinois Policy Institute.

The Midwestern Exodus Is Finally Ending

Longtime migration away from parts of Rust Belt starts to reverse; housing affordability is pull for metro areas like Akron, Ohio.

By Jeanne Whalen and Paul Overberg, WSJ

May 24, 2026 9:00 pm ET

The Midwest gained 16,000 people from other U.S. regions in the year ending last June, reversing perennial population losses.

AKRON, Ohio—For many years, the abandoned B.F. Goodrich tire factory was a symbol of this city’s manufacturing decline. Recently it was the magnet that drew Nate Albright back to town.

Albright, a 30-year-old engineer who grew up near Akron, had moved to Las Vegas with his wife during the pandemic. He wasn’t necessarily looking to return, until a tech startup housed in the Goodrich building lured him back with an engineering job that combined his main interests—software and manufacturing.

“The building was empty for some time, and now it’s kind of regrowing as a tech hub,” Albright said from a renovated corridor in the factory, where the floors are still striped with yellow lines that once guided forklift traffic. Dozens of other startups operate in the building, while another wing of the redbrick factory has been converted to swanky apartments.

Albright’s return is part of the early stage of a hopeful trend in not just northeast Ohio, but throughout the Midwest. For decades, the swath from the Dakotas to Ohio steadily lost population to other parts of the country, as manufacturing jobs disappeared and the growth of the service economy pulled people to the South.

Now signs are emerging that the out-migration is slowing, and, in some places, even starting to reverse.

It may be too early to call a Midwest Renaissance, but for the first time in years, the numbers are pointing in an upbeat direction. In the year that ended last June, census estimates show, the Midwest gained slightly more people from the rest of the country than it lost—about 16,000—reversing perennial losses that topped 175,000 as recently as 2022.

The improvement is most evident in places with service-based economies such as Indianapolis, Columbus and Des Moines. But it is also showing up in metropolitan areas like Cleveland and Akron, which have struggled to evolve from their industrial legacies.

Changes in population totals stem from three factors: domestic moves, international migration, and the balance of births and deaths. In both the Cleveland and Akron metro areas, which include the cities and eight adjoining counties, flat or shrinking populations have reversed into modest gains in recent years. Both also have turned net migration losses to other states into net gains, according to recent census estimates.

Similar signs of reversal have appeared in some other Midwest metros, including Dayton and Canton, in Ohio, and Racine, Wis.

The Bounce Innovation Hub, top, is part of a once-abandoned B.F. Goodrich complex, where other buildings remain decrepit. The innovation hub has attracted startups, including Skyhopper, bottom.

The turnaround in northeast Ohio is mostly driven by a slowdown in residents leaving for other parts of the country. Midwesterners in recent decades have flocked to Sunbelt states that promised plentiful jobs, but that migration has slowed as job growth in the South has cooled.

Housing affordability is also making the Midwest more attractive, as many Americans are finding themselves priced out of markets such as Miami and Atlanta that for years pulled people south. The median sales price for an existing single-family home in the Akron and Cleveland metro areas last year was $226,000 and $237,400, respectively, versus $419,300 nationwide, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“When you live in a place that’s been losing population since the 1960s, to say out loud that we believe this place can stabilize and grow…it landed on some ears as ridiculous,” said Kyle Kutuchief, a program director in Akron for the philanthropic Knight Foundation. “And to now be at a place where we’re leveling off and starting to tick up a little bit, it gives me goosebumps.”

For decades, the Rust Belt has been an unwelcome moniker for a region in decline. The shift of manufacturing jobs to less expensive states in the South, or to Asia, started clobbering many Midwestern factory towns in the 1970s.

In its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, Akron was nicknamed the “Rubber Capital of the World.” The tire barons who built B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, General Tire and Goodyear erected giant factories and mansions around town. Foreign competition and industry consolidation caused most of those plants, and all of the headquarters save Goodyear’s, to close by the 1990s. By then, rocker Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had penned the song “My City Was Gone” about her hometown.

Since then, Akron has been known to those outside the region mostly as the hometown of LeBron James, who has invested in several charitable projects in town, including a school for struggling students.

The city of Akron lost about one-third of its population from its 1960 peak through 2020. Since then, it has stayed relatively flat.

The city of Cleveland lost nearly 60% of its population from 1960 to 2020, and it has since fallen another 2%, though the rate of loss has slowed considerably. Another Rust Belt stalwart, Detroit, lost 60% of its population over that period, but has since seen its population recover slightly.

Challenges persist in the region, but bright spots continue to pop up. Federal, state and private efforts to support tech startups and residential development are breathing new life into some industrial corridors in northeast Ohio—projects that have helped attract new and returning residents.

Tech turnaround

The company where Albright works, Harmoni, is housed in a tech accelerator founded in 2018 with state funds. The nine-story Bounce Innovation Hub is home to more than 60 small companies, including AI and virtual-reality startups and an indoor farm growing arugula, pea shoots and other greens for local restaurants and supermarkets.

Harmoni makes industrial tablets loaded with software that monitors factory machinery to keep it running smoothly. Company co-founder Adam Ellis, who grew up nearby and graduated from University of Akron, said the region, with its lingering industrial foundation, makes an ideal base.

“It’s a question we always get, being a startup—why aren’t you in San Francisco?” Ellis said. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting a machine shop out here. So we can be within driving proximity of just thousands of potential customers.”

Demand for Harmoni’s tech prompted the company to more than double its staff in one month last year, to 21 employees. Albright, also a University of Akron graduate, joined early this year as a customer liaison who helps factories use the technology. Before the move, he and his wife were enjoying the weather and the access to national parks in Las Vegas, where they both had remote jobs. But the Harmoni offer was too good to pass up, he said.

Albright and his wife are renting, and looking to buy, in a suburb west of town. “There seems to be a new generation of people my age, in their 30s and 40s, young families,” he said of his neighborhood. “Even just looking out my window, it’s like there’s a mother pushing a stroller every 10 minutes.”

In an aging society, young families represent a potential long-term asset as homeowners, taxpayers, employers, donors, volunteers—and parents. The Cleveland and Akron metro areas have recorded more deaths than births for almost a decade, although the balance has improved since the pandemic. The still-negative balance underscores the need to retain natives and to draw immigrants, many of whom are young adults.

The former tire factory anchors one end of Akron’s Main Street, which is undergoing a significant overhaul. Several office towers and banks have been converted to housing, and more conversions are planned. A city park received a makeover, and the lobby of the Civic Theater was restored to its 1929 grandeur. On game nights, the minor-league Akron RubberDucks baseball team draws visitors downtown.

But empty storefronts still line parts of Main Street, and foot traffic was light on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “We have a couple of missing teeth downtown but…I think it generally looks pretty good,” said Steve Millard, head of the chamber of commerce.

A chamber-led effort to turn Akron’s rubber expertise into a magnet for new companies has helped bring several startups to the region. The effort, backed by federal and state grants, helped draw BioVerde, which uses microbes to produce chemicals needed for rubber and plastic products. The startup opened a lab and office on the University of Akron campus and hired several local employees, along with a few from out of state. If all goes well BioVerde plans to build a small production facility in Akron, CEO David Witte said.

Although northeast Ohio’s roots are in manufacturing, much of its present job growth, like the rest of the country’s, is in healthcare and other service industries. The Cleveland Clinic, a renowned hospital, is surrounded by new buildings housing medical researchers and tech startups that have attracted out-of-state talent. Along the Cuyahoga River—famous for catching fire in 1969 after decades of pollution, prompting a major cleanup effort—the Cleveland Clinic and the Cavaliers basketball team are jointly developing a new sports-medicine clinic. The team’s holding company is also planning to construct a riverside park and 2,000 housing units.

Budget friendly

Caitlyn Phipps recently moved to Akron from Portland, Ore., to work as secretary to University of Akron’s board of trustees and as an assistant to university president R.J. Nemer. Phipps held a similar job at Portland State University but said she was inspired by Nemer’s work to boost the university, which has recently experienced an uptick in enrollment.

Phipps and her husband are looking to buy a home on Akron’s leafy West or North sides, and have been pleasantly surprised by the prices, she said.

They’ve toured a number of quaint three-bedroom homes in neighborhoods where they can walk to restaurants and shops, and everything has been well below their budget of $300,000, she said.

“I never thought about buying a home in Portland,” Phipps said.

Now, I’m like, we can do this and it’s not going to blow our budget out of the water.”

Many of Akron’s recent arrivals are “boomerangers”—people returning to their childhood towns after living out of state. At a recent cocktail hour for young professionals on Akron’s North Side, Alexis King, 31, recounted “grudgingly” moving to Akron from Philadelphia in 2020. She had grown up outside of Cleveland and wasn’t wild about returning but did so to be with her now husband, who was living near Akron.

“I said Akron’s fine for now, but I just don’t want to die here,” King recalled. After buying a four-bedroom home in West Akron for $170,000 in 2022, she says she is a convert. King loves the affordability, the hip Highland Square neighborhood and the “grit” that has made Akron determined to overcome its difficulties.

A push to retain young college graduates and summer interns also has borne fruit. The Greater Cleveland Partnership, the region’s chamber of commerce, has spent several years helping connect thousands of interns in the region for baseball games and beach outings on Lake Erie, to convince them they can have a fun, 20-something life in the region. “Kids want to see that other kids are moving to a region. They want to be part of something larger,” said Baiju Shah, head of the partnership.

The West Akron neighborhood where the Kings bought a home for $170,000 in 2022.

In recent years, a growing number of graduates from 22 local universities, including Case Western Reserve in Cleveland and Kent State outside of Akron, have stayed in the region after graduating, Shah said—about 52% from the class of 2024 at those schools, versus 47% from the class of 2021.

A clutch of small towns in the rolling green countryside between Cleveland and Akron have been a draw for out-of-state transplants in recent years, thanks to their relatively affordable housing and proximity to parks and big-city culture. Katie Madio, a real-estate agent in Hudson, an affluent, bucolic town in Summit County, says she has helped 16 families move to the area over the past year from states including Texas and Florida.

Courtney Smith and her husband are moving this month to Hudson from the suburbs of Dallas. The couple, who will continue to work their same remote jobs in finance and data analytics, grew tired of the “brutal” summers in Texas and wanted to be closer to friends and family in the eastern U.S. and Canada, Smith said. Friends in Cleveland persuaded them to check out the Hudson area, where they fell in love with the green countryside and the small-town life.

“This just sort of feels like I’m in a Hallmark movie,” Smith said. “It’s like I’m going to walk into the local bakery and fall in love with the head baker.”

Real-estate agent Madio herself grew up near Hudson but left Ohio after college and spent a decade in California. “I always said I would never come back to Northeast Ohio. I was over the cold and the winter,” she said one evening while hosting a women’s-club happy hour on Hudson’s main street.

In California, she and her husband lived near the beach in Santa Monica, where they had their first child. When she got pregnant with her second child, she persuaded her husband, a New York City native, to move to Hudson.

“I just longed for my kids to have the same childhood I had, a slower pace of life,” she said. “And the ability to just kind of breathe.”