So he started looking elsewhere, settling on Houston just last year.

"In Houston, I can be a blue-collar entrepreneur. With the Houston housing market, it made sense to come here," said Giusti, who started a house-painting business.

Giusti was one of tens of thousands of residents who vacated some of the nation's biggest, most densely-populated and costly metropolitan areas in favor of Sunbelt destinations during the first full year of the pandemic, from mid-2020 to mid-2021, according to new data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The pandemic intensified population trends of migration to the South and West, as well as a slowdown in growth in the biggest cities in the U.S.