[Crawford]

You could hypothetically have a crazy tight housing market with significant population loss. Just have plummeting per-unit population. But there's no evidence that's happening.

You could even have a booming worker totals and growing school enrollment with significant population loss. Maybe all the retirees and jobless left. But, again, no evidence of such movement.

And I don't think anyone is arguing against the premise that older metros are generally growing very slowly, at best. This has generally been true since the Great Depression. We've had nearly 100 years of U.S. legacy metros generally underperforming the newer Sunbelt metros. The issue is that the Census annual estimates don't come close to the decennial counts, so something is very off.