Top Idaho pandemic destination was Meridian

Because the Boise area is a frequent location mentioned by moving studies, it should be no surprise that yet still another of these recently featured the Treasure Valley. A collaborative piece of research by two companies — AllConnect.com, which brokers internet services nationally, and MyMove.com, which brokers moving services — used their own in-house data on moving firms, internet providers and the United States Postal Service. AllConnect released its study on the last day of May and MyMove released an update to a previous report during the first week of June.

One interesting surprise in their data is that during the worst of the pandemic lockdowns last spring and summer, Meridian — not Boise — was one of the top-20 cities moving destinations in the nation.

Only four areas in the northwest were listed in the top areas where people moved. Looking at the the top-50 communities that gained people, Meridian shared its moving target status with Bend, Oregon and suburbs of Seattle. On the other hand, Seattle made the top-50 list of places people moved from.

Another atypical result covered by this collaborative study was that half the population of the country lacks the necessary broadband access to just maintain a virtual meeting on Zoom. Just under 15% has no internet connectivity at all. Given that, Idaho is currently ranked 46th by internet benchmarker SpeedTest.net for broadband. This is jarring, considering that over 40% who were able to keep working during the pandemic last year did so remotely.

Did Idaho become a magnet for remote workers? Based on a survey from the Pew Research Center, a part of the Pew Charitable Trusts: only 1% of the survey respondents said they moved due to the ability to work remotely. Another study, with the title of “From L.A. to Boise,” found that over 75% who moved for remote work made more than $100,000 annually. That result may tie into an article from Business Insider that affluent people flooded Rocky Mountain resort areas last year during the pandemic, as anyone who watches Sun Valley or Coeur d’Alene real estate already knows.

One permutation of the AllConnect/MyMove research was a nationwide breakdown of where people moved from and where they moved to during 2020. The moving data for Idaho was unexpected. While the Treasure Valley and Magic Valley saw an increase in people moving in, all of eastern Idaho and the Lewis-and-Clark Valley saw more people moving out for the second year in a row.

In response to an inquiry from the Idaho Business Review about moving data for Boise, Coeur d’Alene, Lewiston, Twin Falls, Pocatello and Idaho Falls, Joe Supan and Jess Hunt replied: “Across these six Idaho cities, the rate of moves into them increased in each one from 2019 to 2020. So while Pocatello, Idaho Falls and Lewiston still had more people moving out than in 2020, those rates were much smaller than in the year before. In every Idaho city, we saw more people move in than in 2019, which seems to be a direct impact of COVID: cheaper cities with easy access to nature became much more attractive while people were working from home.”

People moved into a region stretching from the Idaho Panhandle eastward across the mountainous areas of Montana as far as Bozeman and into the Absaroka Range and Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. One spot next to this sea of people moving into Idaho, Montana and Wyoming showed the highest number of people leaving: the northwest corner of Wyoming covered by Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park.

When put into perspective of people seeking out the mountain and resort areas of the West are desirable locations for more affluent people, the net increase for the Idaho Panhandle to north Wyoming region is consistent with other documented trends. The moving-away blip around Yellowstone is likely influenced by the decrease in tourism and hospitality businesses.