
Interactive Map: Where Americans Are Moving - lief79
http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html?preload=39099#
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asmithmd1
Very interesting data but not a great interactive graphic. Instead of color to
indicate direction maybe they could have used curved lines and arching over
the strait line could be in and under could be out.

They don't even try to graph per capita income -- which naturally lends itself
to red/black. Are poor people moving in or out? Are high wage earners? or
everyone? It is not possible to tell unless you start clicking around.

For example, you click on Atlanta you see a mass of black lines heading from
the northeast to Atlanta. But if hover over Middlesex county (Boston) you see
the detail of 188 people leaving Boston with an average income of $38,700 and
151 people moving from Atlanta to Boston with per capita income of $174,100.

I'll take that trade any day.

I give the graphic a C+, great data, good first try, but re-cook it.

~~~
bilbo0s
I'm thinking there is more to it than what you've outlined. If the 188 people
are, on balance, younger, one would expect a lower per capita income. Which
would make the trade a horrible one. Consider, 188 young hungry twenty to
thirty five year old men and women, for 151 forty to fifty year old men and
women. I think if I'm Atlanta, I'm comfortable with that trade.

I think the Southern cities are doing a good job attracting a more youthful
demographic. Click on Harris County in Texas, (Houston). I think it is
probably the 'blackest' on the map. Most of the people moving there have lower
incomes. Yet at the same time they just elected an openly lesbian woman, with
an adopted black daughter as mayor. I think there is a lot of evidence like
this that massive numbers of young, hungry and educated people are probably
moving in to Houston.

And yet.

I think the best places to move to, are probably the ones that everyone else
is moving from. For instance, I would wager that the blacks and whites moving
in to the Detroit area are of a higher economic quality than the blacks and
whites moving out of the Detroit area.

Your material point is correct however. We need more information to make any
determinations about whether what the map tells us is promising or troubling
in economic terms. I would just expand the information you cited to include
more than just income. In fact, I think it is more important to know age and
educational level.

~~~
jerf
"For instance, I would wager that the blacks and whites moving in to the
Detroit area are of a higher economic quality than the blacks and whites
moving out of the Detroit area."

I couldn't get to the map (I'm just getting loading dots forever), but: As I
sometimes have to tell people who don't live around here, while Detroit is
every bit the sucking cesspool you've heard of, the greater Detroit
metropolitan area is actually full of relatively upscale and nice places to
live. It even has many businesses that aren't related to the automobile
industry, though not enough. Detroit proper is physically huge, preventing
this area from being called the greate Southfield/Novi metropolitan area. My
guess is that virtually nobody is moving into Detroit itself, but that there
are still some things in the same county and certainly in the surrounding
counties that might see some people moving in. Net loss, of course, but
there's always some people moving somewhere.

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pyre
\- Orange County, CA is pretty interesting. There is a lot of migration
inwards from the East Coast/Upper Midwest (e.g. PA, MI), but lots of migration
outwards throughout the country. [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-
moving-wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-
wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html?preload=06059)]

\- Oakland County [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-
in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-
counties-map.html?preload=26125)] (Ann Arbor, U of M, Slashdot) and Wayne
County (Detroit) [link:[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-
wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-
interactive-counties-map.html?preload=26163)] in Michigan have mass flight.

\- Multnomah County, OR [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-
wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-
interactive-counties-map.html?preload=41051)] is a bunch of solid black lines
from throughout the country. Everyone wants to be in Portland, but the Oregon
unemployment numbers are comparable to Michigan, IIRC.

\- Polk County, FL [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-
wealthy-in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-
interactive-counties-map.html?preload=12105)] seems to have mass migration
from the East Coast, while leaking people the the west.

\- Erie [[http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-
in...](http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-
counties-map.html?preload=36029)] (Buffalo, NY/Niagara Falls, NY) County in
upstate New York seems to have seen a mass flight too.

[update] On re-reading my comments, you might take the numbers from Oakland
County with a grain of salt. Ann Arbor _is_ a college town to a large
university, so some of that flight may just be people taking jobs after
graduating (or dropping out of university and moving home).

[update] Added links

~~~
dminor
> Multnomah County, OR is a bunch of solid black lines from throughout the
> country. Everyone wants to be in Portland, but the Oregon unemployment
> numbers are comparable to Michigan, IIRC.

Both of our recent hires moved here first, and found a job afterwards.
Portland is seen as hip and comparatively inexpensive, so if you're going to
be unemployed, might as well do it here.

~~~
pyre
> _Portland is seen as hip and comparatively inexpensive_

Portland doesn't seems about the same cost-of-living-wise to Toronto, ON. So I
don't really see it as 'cheap.' (Maybe compared to NYC...)

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machrider
Clicking randomly around the midwest is sort of amazing. I'm not sure if it's
a lack of data for those areas, but almost no one migrates in or out.

~~~
peregrine
I think that is the case for smaller counties everywhere. The most likely the
town is to have a college the more moving. For instance check out Milwaukee
which has three colleges.

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stcredzero
Atlanta is like a cannon, drawing in people from the eastern half of the US
and spewing them out to the West Coast. (With a notable exception in southern
CA.)

Seems like everyone is moving to Austin and no one is leaving.

~~~
blehn
Atlanta in theory: Warm weather, lots of opportunity, Big City living without
the high price.

Atlanta in reality: Terrible weather, terrible traffic, terrible public
transportation, mostly dull jobs and local commerce, incompetent public
officials, not actually a Big City (more accurately, a sprawling collection of
strip malls with some tall banks and hotels scattered about), devoid of
interesting art, culture, history (Civil Rights movement excepted),
architecture

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dasil003
Kinda weird to see myself as a statistic. My wife and I are two of fourteen
people that moved from Santa Fe county to Santa Clara county in 2008. I want
to find the others now :)

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ck2
No one else is concerned about the abuse of IRS data?

Apparently it's possible to do an end-run around "legally protected" census
data via IRS data.

ps. I can see Microsoft's recruiting patterns from colleges with this map.

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Dove
What a terrible visualization! It tells you nothing until you click on it, and
is very hard to read even after you've clicked.

The main map should color counties by net inward and outward migration so you
can see highlights and broad regional patterns at a glance. Upon clicking a
county, it should color the remaining counties by net inward and outward
migration relative to the highlighted one.

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freejoe76
Click on Detroit.

~~~
ricosroughnecks
Nice one! Detroiters should get the reference. Ahh, not surprised one bit.
That place is where I was raised, but alas, I was a part of that mass exodus.
Besides family (and some awesome Mexican food), I don't miss the city one bit.

There is NOTHING in Detroit. NOTHING! It's as depressing as it is telling. I
feel this exodus is a vicious cycle that won't stop anytime soon. No one is
there, hence no new money is being invested, thus more people move...ad
infinitum.

The primary culture of the youth (read: thugs) isn't helping one bit either --
they tend to get more dangerous and erratic each year.

If you have any questions about growing up in Detroit, feel free to ask!

~~~
vital101
I'm from Michgan as well, and have a lot of family in the greater Detroit
area. The sense of despair that most people in the area feel is just awful.
After the auto plants started to close up, people just started packing up in
hopes of finding work elsewhere. Some moved in-state, but most make the flight
south and west (warmer weather, more jobs). I was recently in Dearborn for a
wedding, and the number of empty & foreclosed houses is just staggering.

~~~
ricosroughnecks
Yeah, it's pretty wild. And Dearborn is one of the "better" areas. Some parts
of the city look like scenes from a Mad Max film. Everything is either
foreclosed, empty, or burned.

You know, someone with a little money in their pocket come buy up half of the
Detroit area; however, what would they do with it?

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joshu
Any sense of where to get the source data?

I wonder what the first principal eigenvector looks like.

~~~
tmsh
<http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=212683,00.html>

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phaedrus
If you click on the more rural western Oklahoma counties, all the movement is
just between adjacent rural counties. As someone who worked hard to break out
of a small town, I find that a bit depressing - no one is "escaping" and no
fresh ideas are entering.

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euroclydon
I noticed that about 200 people have moved from the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill
area where I live to Seattle. I often dream of that move. I spent ten days out
there sailing and backpacking one summer. Nine sunny days, and it only rained
on then tenth.

I'm wondering if anyone here has moved out to Seattle from somewhere similar
to NC, and could tell me what their reaction was?

~~~
nihilocrat
I have some friends from college who made such a move. They said it's
ridiculously expensive, rainy all the time (duh), and it gets much hotter in
the summer than anyone wants to admit, because it's hard to find a place with
A/C.

Of course, they are loving it anyways, they are both employed by a publisher
of roleplaying books, and they are both huge roleplaying nerds. I would have
moved out there if I had the chance, but instead I got relocated to Montreal
and I'm quite liking it here.

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lyudmil
New Orleans is worth a look. Having visited last year and fallen in love with
the city, it's encouraging to see people moving in.

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Jtsummers
This is kind of fun. Check out counties holding military bases, particularly
less populous counties like Garfield, OK or Lowndes, GA. Most of the movement
in and out of those counties is related to the military. Though in the case of
Lowndes there's also a university pulling people in from Atlanta.

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davidw
Interesting, but, agreed, not the greatest map.

Deschutes County, OR (Bend, basically): Californication.

Boulder, County, CO: a lot of people are going there, but those who leave
appear headed for the pacific northwest.

Maricopa, County, AZ (Phoenix): wow... that's a lot of people.

~~~
sanderjd
Very interesting, I have lived in Boulder for years and can attest that it is
a wonderful area (not _just_ Boulder the entire Denver/Boulder/Colorado
Springs front range is beautiful) that is noticeably growing. It is also
palpable, just anecdotally, that people who talk about moving almost entirely
talk about northern California, Portland, and Seattle. If not the northwest,
then Austin. Very cool to see these anecdotes confirmed by statistics.

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nihilocrat
Apparently no one is moving OUTSIDE of the US! :B

Guess that means I wasn't counted in this data.

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cheald
There seems to be a lot of movement, in general, out of the northeast,
particularly to the southwest.

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whatwhatwhat
People are moving to New York and Dallas.

