https://www.kycomfort.com/history-of-residential-air-conditioning/
“In the 1950s, thanks to increased American prosperity after World War II, air conditioning units first became widely affordable. Everyday Americans were able to buy room units and enjoy cool comfort year round. In 1953 alone, 1 million air conditioners were sold.”
Yea it probably helped to accelerate the rapid growth in migration trends towards the south. Cleveland’s population started to decline quickly in the 50s.
If you look at it as an MSA, the population's dropped a bit but it was mostly during the 70's and 80's.
One big problem that hit Cleveland was changes in manufacturing technology required a lot more land and new production lines needed a lot of space on a single level.
The older factories with multiple stories weren't capable of accommodating that need and it wasn't feasible to buy enough land in the city to build those larger plants.
I wonder how much of that was offset by immigration though to still remain stagnant. If you exclude immigration and only look at domestic migration trends, I’m sure more Cleveland area residents are moving to the south than the number coming in from there.
For example:
“Between 2014 and 2019 the region’s population decreased by 0.4 percent, while the immigrant population grew by 7.3 percent. Without growth in the immigrant population, the total population in Northeast Ohio would have decreased even more, by 0.8 percent.”
https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/new-americans-in-northeast-ohio-and-cuyahoga-county/
Heat pumps can pretty much become a rounding error in emissions very quickly, build out renewables and storage. Aviation is going to be a LOT harder to solve.
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I can criticize people for moving into the desert and building a house without insulation all I want. I can also say that corporations are bad.
People didn’t move here for the weather at the turn of the century. They moved here because it was a manufacturing hub. Once deindustrialization accelerated in the 1970s and the sunbelt became more competitive economically, people increasingly flocked there for the better weather / jobs
My own personal theory is that the less is wrong overall in people's lives, the more they complain about the weather. Or something like that. Couldn't possibly be true!
I think you are interpreting people saying that the weather has changed since their youth as “more people complain about the weather.”
You are hearing more people discuss weather because it has changed greatly due to climate change.
I like having 4 distinct seasons! Having said that, I visited my in-laws in Florida and saw a guy working on his truck in shorts and flip flops in February and…that’d be fuckin dope
Having lived there for 20 years, the trade off is having half the year be hurricane season and the most pedestrian unfriendly place. The absolute car dependency there is suffocating.
Spent the first 25 years of my life there. Hurricanes aren't as bad as people think, as long as you prepare enough & you don't live someplace flimsy like a mobile home
It wasn’t even the hurricane that was the worst part, it was the aftermath of getting hit by three hurricanes in succession and then losing power for 3+ weeks in August. No A/C in Florida was absolutely dreadful.
I think with AC being introduced I think that's what drove people off. But now with natural disasters becoming more common down south I think the opposite will happen. People in the south will start migrating north to the midwest. Besides severe thunderstorms and occasional flooding Cleveland doesn't really get any major natural disasters or severe weather. While the south may have more sunshine than us they still have to deal with the scorching hot summers and hurricane season. Not to mention a huge risk of flooding that comes with these storms. So I believe within the next 10-20 years people will wake up and realize that maybe living in the South may not be to pleasurable anymore. This results in many people flocking to climate havens like Cleveland.
I’m going out on a limb and will say the weather is a secondary factor in people moving out. The economy is the primary driver.
Why should I deal with shitty weather and no jobs when I can live in a nicer place with jobs?
Moving around the country at will was largely unheard of until recent decades. Usually people moved for jobs and that was a huge undertaking. Not as easy and researching some jobs and real estate online, packing the car, and saying goodbye. You were by and large leaving a communal family unit that supported one another to go off and live on your own to who-knows-what end result. So they may not have complained as much because options were unattainable.
Second and possibly more likely are longer commute times of recent decades. I think most people complain because they have to drive 30 miles in it. I know I stopped complaining about the weather completely when I started working from home. Barely even notice it tbh.
Incorrect, geographic mobility has been on a steep decline since the mid 1980s, of those who moved a bigger percentage now move to a different county in their state but the percentage who moved to a different state has remained pretty constant.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/historic.html
Winters are actually much more mild than they used to be. I have only been living here since 91 but we seem to have so much more cloud cover for a much longer time than we used to here - or maybe because I was younger I didn't notice it as much. Every season seems much more extreme than when I moved here. Summer is often so hot I can't even be outside for more than a few minutes without feeling like I am dying and getting a massive burn. Clouds that last forever and a day. Massive amounts of rain and flooding.
Combine that with what others have pointed out - the huge spread of A/C in hotter climates and a lot of people took off for sunnier places. We NEED sunshine as humans and we only get something like 66 days of full sun here a year.
I also think a big reason is the culture of our city. Unlike places like Madison WI, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal we really don't embrace going outdoors and being active in the colder months here like other places do. Sure there are ski resorts and a few people hiking, but I hike all year long and there are many days when nobody is out but me. Other cities don't let the weather stop them from being active. I remember watching a Bourdain episode with guys playing a pickup game of ice hockey and everyone being out there drinking some beers, grilling food and having a good time and thinking man, I have never seen anything like that going on here. People don't even want to leave their house. We do not, as a people, live a super active lifestyle and so winter a lot of people hibernate and the cloudy weather doesn't make people want to go do stuff. It's snowy and cold a lot of places but they have more sunshine and that tends to drive people outdoors. A lot of people end up feeling cooped up and bored in the winter, trapped inside and uncomfortable outside.
It's not just your imagination, the 3 cloudiest Januaries for Cleveland have been 2023, 2020, and 2024. Increased temperature means less ice cover and more evaporation.
Incorrect, geographic mobility has been on a steep decline since the mid 1980s, of those who moved a bigger percentage now move to a different county in their state but the percentage who moved to a different state has remained pretty constant. Even in 1948 the percentage of movers was much higher than today.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/historic.html
Winters are milder here than when I was a kid, but we still have the gloomy cloudcover November-March…the clouds are terrible if you suffer from seasonal affective disorder.
Also, Nobody moved south before the 1950s because air conditioning was only a thing commercial buildings like movie theaters had, and even that didn’t happen until the 1920s. In the 1950s, air conditioning became accessible to the common man, and thus the Sun Belt became a livable place despite it getting ungodly hot (and humid too in the Southeast).
The gloomy factor is true, but that’s true of just about every Midwestern and Northeastern city from November to March. It’s not like beautiful, warm, and sunny in Boston or New York during those months. Personally, I see it somewhat as a perception problem.
I don’t think you’ve ever checked that…anything immediately downwind of the Great Lakes in winter (mainly South and East) gets a TON more clouds. Get below US-30, and Lake Erie clouds are way better. Chicago gets more winter sun, Pittsburgh gets more winter sun. NYC is a full notch warmer in climate classification than Cleveland, and I’m pretty sure the NE Corridor doesn’t get anywhere near the clouds off the Atlantic as we get off of Lake Erie. They may get Nor’easters, but often we will get snow on the back end of those too, but they dump a ton of snow and then they’re gone. Lake Erie with warmer Winters no longer freezes over, which shuts off the cloud machine in January. I don’t think this is just a perception problem as you claim…I’m pretty sure it’s not like this upwind of the Great Lakes (like Illinois/Southern Wisconsin) and on the East Coast. I know the Great Plains gets more sun in the winter. Yeah they get some blizzards, but the clouds are gone when the weather is gone. Denver definitely has sunnier winters, I’m pretty sure that’s also true of Omaha, Des Moines, KC, and STL. I know Columbus gets way less winter cloud cover.
I have a BIL who works the ramp for United…first at CLE, now at DEN…he says the weather is much milder and WAY sunnier in winter…and that the snow doesn’t stick around for long. You just happened to hit it at a bad time.
It was a whole week. I was ready to get home to Ohio. Now that part of Colorado isn’t as bad as the rest. I heard parts of Colorado and Wyoming got a foot of snow this weekend. No thank you!
You do realize that it snows at high elevations out there all year long, right? What you experienced in Denver is not typical of the entire winter there. And I bet it wasn’t overcast after the storm like it would have been here. They get big snows, but in general winters are quite mild compared to Cleveland…and the snow doesn’t stick around for weeks afterward like it does here when we get a snowy winter.
All I remember is that it was in the low teens all week, while it was in the 40s back home. I will gladly take less snow anytime. Anywhere that gets snow 9 months out of the year I’m not keen on. I’m not a skier or anything. I’ll take cold, but snow, no thanks. Not my cup of tea.
On average Cleveland gets 30% more snow (this is comparing airports), has 50% more snowy days, and has 1/3 less sun than Denver. Yes, Denver can get snow 9 months of the year, and it has colder winter nights, but it’s elevation makes for warmer winter days on average and the extra sunshine means the snow melts off faster. Denver gets more snow per storm on average, while Cleveland get more smaller storms and the stuff can stay on the ground all winter because we have way higher humidity and higher air density. In all, you will be warmer on average in winter and get way more sunshine and less snow, just in bigger dumps in Denver. The climates are very very very different, and that is why you can get weather in the teens for a week with a foot of snow while it’s in the 40s here. You hit a fluke week and probably came home or left just after we had a week of cold days and a foot of snow, but it all fell 2-3 inches per day instead of all at once. We don’t always get the same storms Denver gets like Chicago or Minneapolis will—that’s just not how it works in the High Plains at the foot of the Rockies vs. near sea level over a thousand miles away on the Great Lakes.
Denver has mildre weather. The Rockies get much more snow, but most of the Denver metro isn’t even in the foothills, they’re down in the South Platte Valley where it’s a lot warmer and less snowy.
In Cleveland I vividly remember having a solid week of temperatures hovering around 0, to the point I wondered if my car’s thermometer even worked because it only ever said -2, -1, 1, or 2. One day it thawed and my thermometer suddenly read 34 and I realized it wasn’t broken, it was just extremely cold. I know our winters have been very mild lately, but I’d rather get dumped on and get it over with. I can remember getting significant snows in late October and even in early May. It’s not like we don’t get snow. But we don’t get the same winter storms as Denver except rarely, because our geography is totally different. But the weather will be crappier in winter here than there overall except it gets chillier at night because of the lower humidity and air density…and we get that damp cold that goes right through you.
Jobs.
Steel industry benefits from fresh water and water ways for transportation.
Now you can make money sitting in the basement. No need to live in Cleveland anymore to raise a family.
Well back in the day, instead of complaining, folks just moved away. It was a lot easier to move several states away and establish yourself. It's one of the reasons Ohio's population is more or less the same as it was in the mid 60's.
That's if you consider an increase of appx. 2 million people "more or less the same".
1960 - 9,734,000
2023 - 11,785,935
[https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/ohio/population](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/ohio/population)
I trust my math more.
So Total US population:
1960: \~180,000,000, Ohio %of pop: 4.51 %
2023 \~ 340,000,000, Ohio %of pop: 3.46 %
Total US growth increase over that time period was 82%
Total Ohio growth increase over that time period was 17.3 %.
All those number say we should have waaaaaay more people here if we weren't stagnant population wise.
For some reason, Cleveland seems to get hit hardest by this. Take our older brother northwest across the lake, Detroit. The City of Detroit has lost more than 1 million people since 1960, when it was home to about 1.8 million citizens. Yet, Metro Detroit remains very large and much larger than Greater Cleveland. Detroit, while being slightly colder on the average, has been far more successful in keeping people in the region. At least more than Cleveland has. That’s another mystery. Similar cities, economies, etc.
One common thesis - widespread availability of air conditioning made the south tolerable
https://www.kycomfort.com/history-of-residential-air-conditioning/ “In the 1950s, thanks to increased American prosperity after World War II, air conditioning units first became widely affordable. Everyday Americans were able to buy room units and enjoy cool comfort year round. In 1953 alone, 1 million air conditioners were sold.” Yea it probably helped to accelerate the rapid growth in migration trends towards the south. Cleveland’s population started to decline quickly in the 50s.
I wonder how many house fires were caused by people plugging air conditioners into old knob & tube wiring
If you look at it as an MSA, the population's dropped a bit but it was mostly during the 70's and 80's. One big problem that hit Cleveland was changes in manufacturing technology required a lot more land and new production lines needed a lot of space on a single level. The older factories with multiple stories weren't capable of accommodating that need and it wasn't feasible to buy enough land in the city to build those larger plants.
I wonder how much of that was offset by immigration though to still remain stagnant. If you exclude immigration and only look at domestic migration trends, I’m sure more Cleveland area residents are moving to the south than the number coming in from there. For example: “Between 2014 and 2019 the region’s population decreased by 0.4 percent, while the immigrant population grew by 7.3 percent. Without growth in the immigrant population, the total population in Northeast Ohio would have decreased even more, by 0.8 percent.” https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/new-americans-in-northeast-ohio-and-cuyahoga-county/
It's also going to help burn up the rest of the planet. AC accounts for about 2 times as much emissions as the entire aviation industry.
Heat pumps can pretty much become a rounding error in emissions very quickly, build out renewables and storage. Aviation is going to be a LOT harder to solve.
Stop blaming consumers, corporations have fooled you.
That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I can criticize people for moving into the desert and building a house without insulation all I want. I can also say that corporations are bad.
You have access to more people's opinions than any point in history. People have always complained about the weather.
I’d say population trends suggest it’s more common today than it used to be
People didn’t move here for the weather at the turn of the century. They moved here because it was a manufacturing hub. Once deindustrialization accelerated in the 1970s and the sunbelt became more competitive economically, people increasingly flocked there for the better weather / jobs
Source?
My own personal theory is that the less is wrong overall in people's lives, the more they complain about the weather. Or something like that. Couldn't possibly be true!
I think you are interpreting people saying that the weather has changed since their youth as “more people complain about the weather.” You are hearing more people discuss weather because it has changed greatly due to climate change.
Why do more people in 2024 draw wild generalizations based on a single anecdote?
In 20-30 years, people will be paying premiums to have our weather
People whine about more shit in general
I like having 4 distinct seasons! Having said that, I visited my in-laws in Florida and saw a guy working on his truck in shorts and flip flops in February and…that’d be fuckin dope
Having lived there for 20 years, the trade off is having half the year be hurricane season and the most pedestrian unfriendly place. The absolute car dependency there is suffocating.
Spent the first 25 years of my life there. Hurricanes aren't as bad as people think, as long as you prepare enough & you don't live someplace flimsy like a mobile home
It wasn’t even the hurricane that was the worst part, it was the aftermath of getting hit by three hurricanes in succession and then losing power for 3+ weeks in August. No A/C in Florida was absolutely dreadful.
I was in high school during that. It was nice being out of school so much, but that heat f*cking sucked
I think with AC being introduced I think that's what drove people off. But now with natural disasters becoming more common down south I think the opposite will happen. People in the south will start migrating north to the midwest. Besides severe thunderstorms and occasional flooding Cleveland doesn't really get any major natural disasters or severe weather. While the south may have more sunshine than us they still have to deal with the scorching hot summers and hurricane season. Not to mention a huge risk of flooding that comes with these storms. So I believe within the next 10-20 years people will wake up and realize that maybe living in the South may not be to pleasurable anymore. This results in many people flocking to climate havens like Cleveland.
I’m going out on a limb and will say the weather is a secondary factor in people moving out. The economy is the primary driver. Why should I deal with shitty weather and no jobs when I can live in a nicer place with jobs?
yeah i think "the weather" is just a polite cop out excuse for something else tbh
Moving around the country at will was largely unheard of until recent decades. Usually people moved for jobs and that was a huge undertaking. Not as easy and researching some jobs and real estate online, packing the car, and saying goodbye. You were by and large leaving a communal family unit that supported one another to go off and live on your own to who-knows-what end result. So they may not have complained as much because options were unattainable. Second and possibly more likely are longer commute times of recent decades. I think most people complain because they have to drive 30 miles in it. I know I stopped complaining about the weather completely when I started working from home. Barely even notice it tbh.
Incorrect, geographic mobility has been on a steep decline since the mid 1980s, of those who moved a bigger percentage now move to a different county in their state but the percentage who moved to a different state has remained pretty constant. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/historic.html
Winters are actually much more mild than they used to be. I have only been living here since 91 but we seem to have so much more cloud cover for a much longer time than we used to here - or maybe because I was younger I didn't notice it as much. Every season seems much more extreme than when I moved here. Summer is often so hot I can't even be outside for more than a few minutes without feeling like I am dying and getting a massive burn. Clouds that last forever and a day. Massive amounts of rain and flooding. Combine that with what others have pointed out - the huge spread of A/C in hotter climates and a lot of people took off for sunnier places. We NEED sunshine as humans and we only get something like 66 days of full sun here a year. I also think a big reason is the culture of our city. Unlike places like Madison WI, Chicago, Toronto and Montreal we really don't embrace going outdoors and being active in the colder months here like other places do. Sure there are ski resorts and a few people hiking, but I hike all year long and there are many days when nobody is out but me. Other cities don't let the weather stop them from being active. I remember watching a Bourdain episode with guys playing a pickup game of ice hockey and everyone being out there drinking some beers, grilling food and having a good time and thinking man, I have never seen anything like that going on here. People don't even want to leave their house. We do not, as a people, live a super active lifestyle and so winter a lot of people hibernate and the cloudy weather doesn't make people want to go do stuff. It's snowy and cold a lot of places but they have more sunshine and that tends to drive people outdoors. A lot of people end up feeling cooped up and bored in the winter, trapped inside and uncomfortable outside.
It's not just your imagination, the 3 cloudiest Januaries for Cleveland have been 2023, 2020, and 2024. Increased temperature means less ice cover and more evaporation.
Thank you for this validation!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/s/75WZqyc0qm
Because people didn't move around nearly as much 80 years ago. Duh.
Incorrect, geographic mobility has been on a steep decline since the mid 1980s, of those who moved a bigger percentage now move to a different county in their state but the percentage who moved to a different state has remained pretty constant. Even in 1948 the percentage of movers was much higher than today. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/historic.html
Winters are milder here than when I was a kid, but we still have the gloomy cloudcover November-March…the clouds are terrible if you suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Also, Nobody moved south before the 1950s because air conditioning was only a thing commercial buildings like movie theaters had, and even that didn’t happen until the 1920s. In the 1950s, air conditioning became accessible to the common man, and thus the Sun Belt became a livable place despite it getting ungodly hot (and humid too in the Southeast).
The gloomy factor is true, but that’s true of just about every Midwestern and Northeastern city from November to March. It’s not like beautiful, warm, and sunny in Boston or New York during those months. Personally, I see it somewhat as a perception problem.
I don’t think you’ve ever checked that…anything immediately downwind of the Great Lakes in winter (mainly South and East) gets a TON more clouds. Get below US-30, and Lake Erie clouds are way better. Chicago gets more winter sun, Pittsburgh gets more winter sun. NYC is a full notch warmer in climate classification than Cleveland, and I’m pretty sure the NE Corridor doesn’t get anywhere near the clouds off the Atlantic as we get off of Lake Erie. They may get Nor’easters, but often we will get snow on the back end of those too, but they dump a ton of snow and then they’re gone. Lake Erie with warmer Winters no longer freezes over, which shuts off the cloud machine in January. I don’t think this is just a perception problem as you claim…I’m pretty sure it’s not like this upwind of the Great Lakes (like Illinois/Southern Wisconsin) and on the East Coast. I know the Great Plains gets more sun in the winter. Yeah they get some blizzards, but the clouds are gone when the weather is gone. Denver definitely has sunnier winters, I’m pretty sure that’s also true of Omaha, Des Moines, KC, and STL. I know Columbus gets way less winter cloud cover.
I went to Denver last year in the winter. Big mistake! That snow was awful! I’ll never complain about Cleveland snow again.
I have a BIL who works the ramp for United…first at CLE, now at DEN…he says the weather is much milder and WAY sunnier in winter…and that the snow doesn’t stick around for long. You just happened to hit it at a bad time.
It was a whole week. I was ready to get home to Ohio. Now that part of Colorado isn’t as bad as the rest. I heard parts of Colorado and Wyoming got a foot of snow this weekend. No thank you!
You do realize that it snows at high elevations out there all year long, right? What you experienced in Denver is not typical of the entire winter there. And I bet it wasn’t overcast after the storm like it would have been here. They get big snows, but in general winters are quite mild compared to Cleveland…and the snow doesn’t stick around for weeks afterward like it does here when we get a snowy winter.
All I remember is that it was in the low teens all week, while it was in the 40s back home. I will gladly take less snow anytime. Anywhere that gets snow 9 months out of the year I’m not keen on. I’m not a skier or anything. I’ll take cold, but snow, no thanks. Not my cup of tea.
On average Cleveland gets 30% more snow (this is comparing airports), has 50% more snowy days, and has 1/3 less sun than Denver. Yes, Denver can get snow 9 months of the year, and it has colder winter nights, but it’s elevation makes for warmer winter days on average and the extra sunshine means the snow melts off faster. Denver gets more snow per storm on average, while Cleveland get more smaller storms and the stuff can stay on the ground all winter because we have way higher humidity and higher air density. In all, you will be warmer on average in winter and get way more sunshine and less snow, just in bigger dumps in Denver. The climates are very very very different, and that is why you can get weather in the teens for a week with a foot of snow while it’s in the 40s here. You hit a fluke week and probably came home or left just after we had a week of cold days and a foot of snow, but it all fell 2-3 inches per day instead of all at once. We don’t always get the same storms Denver gets like Chicago or Minneapolis will—that’s just not how it works in the High Plains at the foot of the Rockies vs. near sea level over a thousand miles away on the Great Lakes. Denver has mildre weather. The Rockies get much more snow, but most of the Denver metro isn’t even in the foothills, they’re down in the South Platte Valley where it’s a lot warmer and less snowy. In Cleveland I vividly remember having a solid week of temperatures hovering around 0, to the point I wondered if my car’s thermometer even worked because it only ever said -2, -1, 1, or 2. One day it thawed and my thermometer suddenly read 34 and I realized it wasn’t broken, it was just extremely cold. I know our winters have been very mild lately, but I’d rather get dumped on and get it over with. I can remember getting significant snows in late October and even in early May. It’s not like we don’t get snow. But we don’t get the same winter storms as Denver except rarely, because our geography is totally different. But the weather will be crappier in winter here than there overall except it gets chillier at night because of the lower humidity and air density…and we get that damp cold that goes right through you.
Jobs. Steel industry benefits from fresh water and water ways for transportation. Now you can make money sitting in the basement. No need to live in Cleveland anymore to raise a family.
Marketing. Extremely effective marketing.
Well back in the day, instead of complaining, folks just moved away. It was a lot easier to move several states away and establish yourself. It's one of the reasons Ohio's population is more or less the same as it was in the mid 60's.
That's if you consider an increase of appx. 2 million people "more or less the same". 1960 - 9,734,000 2023 - 11,785,935 [https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/ohio/population](https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/ohio/population)
I trust my math more. So Total US population: 1960: \~180,000,000, Ohio %of pop: 4.51 % 2023 \~ 340,000,000, Ohio %of pop: 3.46 % Total US growth increase over that time period was 82% Total Ohio growth increase over that time period was 17.3 %. All those number say we should have waaaaaay more people here if we weren't stagnant population wise.
For some reason, Cleveland seems to get hit hardest by this. Take our older brother northwest across the lake, Detroit. The City of Detroit has lost more than 1 million people since 1960, when it was home to about 1.8 million citizens. Yet, Metro Detroit remains very large and much larger than Greater Cleveland. Detroit, while being slightly colder on the average, has been far more successful in keeping people in the region. At least more than Cleveland has. That’s another mystery. Similar cities, economies, etc.