Most of our readers almost certainly are aware of the Great Migration: the Covid-era phenomenon of people taking advantage of work-from-home policies and leaving major overcrowded cities for new destinations. The reasons and locations are varied, but typically surround a few key concepts, primarily leaving high cost-of-living and high tax areas for locations which are more affordable in both arenas.
It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that Arizona has been a beneficiary (depending on how you look at it) from these policies. While millions have left California, hundreds of thousands have moved to Arizona. If you were a homeowner before Covid, you likely see it as a positive. If you’re a renter with aspirations of homeownership, it’s much less positive.
That said, according to a recent report from an international consultancy, the city of Scottsdale still has a lot of potential room to benefit from the Great Migration, as Henley & Partners recently named it in its top three cities for potential millionaire population growth.
It was named alongside Palm Springs, CA and Greenwich, CT in that top three, for reasons such as resort-like homes and amenities, including golf courses, coming in at a much lower cost than in our neighbors to the west, as well as lower taxes and strong qualify-of-life as incentives for people to make the move.
According to Henley & Partners, 14,500 Scottsdalians currently are millionaires, putting it at about a 7% millionaire rate. While a relatively modest number, certainly as compared to bigger cities, that number has also more than doubled over the last decade. Considering that 1,555 people moved from the county that houses Silicon Valley to Maricopa County in the years leading up to the pandemic (and that number very likely spiking considerably in the years after the pandemic), it shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
Hopefully states like New York and California are taking notes: when you tax your productive members of society excessively, they not only have the ability to vote with their ballots but with their feet, and eventually they will be forced to either raise taxes more on the people who suffer in silence, or drastically cut spending. Actually, hopefully they don’t learn, because their loss is our gain.