Remote workers relocating didn’t create a population surge in Colorado during pandemic

True or false? Colorado attracted a disproportionate number of remote workers leaving behind crowded apartment blocks in San Francisco and New York, resulting in the state’s population surging during the pandemic.

The reality is that Colorado’s population rose by only 30,551 in the 12 months through July 1, 2021, the smallest annual increase in three decades. That gain was about half the 58,001 people the state added in 2019 and less than a third of the nearly 99,000 added in 2015, according to the Colorado State Demography Office.

Aside from the extra deaths tied to the COVID-19 virus, the big reason for the smallish gain was that net migration, the sum of those leaving versus those coming in, fell significantly last year to 15,477. It was the weakest net migration number since about 2005 and a clear indicator that a wave of remote workers didn’t overwhelm the state.

“As we have been saying, growth has been slowing,” said Nancy Gedeon, a demographer who spoke Friday morning at the 40th Colorado Demography Summit. The pandemic just put the brakes on even more.

The other half of the population growth the state did see represented births in excess of deaths or what is known as the natural increase. Colorado had 46,499 deaths and 61.976 births last year. Births have been trending lower since the Great Recession, while deaths have been trending higher due to an aging population, with another big push from COVID-19 and related deaths.

International migration, already under pressure because of more restrictive policies, slowed sharply during the pandemic, so that was one factor. But Colorado simply didn’t do as well as in past years in drawing new people from other states. Denver, Boulder, Jefferson, Arapahoe and Adams all saw more people leave than come in. It was bad enough to push Boulder, Denver and Jefferson counties to population losses.

Douglas County was an exception in the metro area — it maintained strong momentum. Weld County was also a popular destination, despite having the weakest job recovery rates of any large county in the state. El Paso, Pueblo, Larimer and Mesa counties had positive net migration.

Gedeon suspects that high housing costs might be pushing more people to leave metro Denver, resulting in an outflow of residents. Metro area planners would be well advised to pay more attention to housing affordability.

But if housing costs are an important determinant, then why did an even more expensive region for housing do so well in drawing in new people? The state’s nine central mountain counties, which are concentrated along the central I-70 corridor, had the biggest percentage gain in population of any region the demography office tracked last year, 1.6%, which was more than triple the Front Range growth rate of 0.5%.