Report: Tampa Bay's population growth slows as cost of living rises

The number of people packing their bags and moving to Tampa Bay is slowing down.

According to a new report from Seattle real estate technology firm Redfin, the metro area saw a net inflow of just over 10,000 people last year compared with a 35,000-person net inflow the year before.

That was, Redfin says, “the biggest slowdown in domestic migration of the 50 most populous U.S. metros.”

(The firm defines net inflow as how many more people move into a metro area than move out. It counts domestic moves only.)

Tampa wasn’t the only Florida metro area that saw a slowdown in the number of people coming. Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando also saw drops.

This trend reverses a pattern that began in 2020 when Florida started to see a huge influx of people coming to the state during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.

It was largely driven by the shift to the work-from-home model. This freed people up to move from their geographic boundaries and, like generations before them, come to a place where the sunshine was year round and the cost of living was far less than most northern metropolises.

But with the arrivistes came higher housing prices and housing shortages as well as more demand on infrastructure, leaving many who had lived here before scrambling.

These factors, the Redfin report finds, are part of the reason people are no longer coming in waves as before.

“Places like Tampa, Dallas and Austin,” the report says, “were once seen as affordable alternatives to high-cost cities like San Francisco and New York, but now the gap in housing costs between big-city job centers and Sun Belt metros has shrunk.”

The report finds that there are more affordable options — the Midwest and the Northeast — for those who still want to move. And plenty of concerns — higher mortgage rates and widespread economic uncertainty about inflation and layoffs — for those remaining where they are.

And, this being Florida, complicating matters is the rising cost of insurance and the rising intensity in storms.

“People used to move to Florida partly because they could get a deal,” Bryan Carnaggio a Redfin Premier agent in Florida, says in the report.

“Now, people can’t afford to move here.”