Interactive Map: Where Americans Are Moving | Hacker News Reader

Interactive Map: Where Americans Are Moving

forbes.com

108 pointslief7940 comments

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.

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.

"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.

Boston is in Suffolk County

- 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...]

- Oakland County [http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-in...] (Ann Arbor, U of M, Slashdot) and Wayne County (Detroit) [link:http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-in...] in Michigan have mass flight.

- Multnomah County, OR [http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-in...] 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...] 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...] (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

> 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.

> 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...)

What company? Contemplating making the same move myself early next year ;)

Ann Arbor (and U of M, etc.) is in Washtenaw County, not Oakland.

Been away from Michigan too long apparently...

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.

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.

I found the same for a lot of counties in Eastern states, and then tried counties that I know are small in the west and saw the same thing (only much larger distances between counties there).

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

Click on Detroit.

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!

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.

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?

Here's a question: how the hell did you get awesome Mexican food that far away from Mexico? I hear people from Texas and California talk about awesome Mexican food, but never Detroit.

Haha, yeah, it seems surprising at first, but Detroit has a HUGE Mexican and Hispanic population. Also (and due to) we have Mexican Town -- check your English at the door! Whatever you're in the mood for (flautas, tostadas, chorizo), you can find it there.

Note: I've been in Japan for 3 years now, and it's nigh impossible to find decent Mexican/Tex-Mex :-( ...

When I was living in Washington State, I was told that there were entire towns of Spanish speakers which were not listed on maps. Social Workers and local/county government people knew where they were, but a mainstream citizen could spend their entire life unaware of their existence. (I heard about them because I did some volunteer work with the county.)

Not surprising. I guess it happens everywhere. Out here, you visit some obscure town, and as you get off the train, you realize everyone is speaking Korean or Mandarin. I guess it's a combination of family moving near family, and friends moving near friends (sometimes coupled with political ties -- e.g. the Hmong population in Minnesota). All of a sudden, you have an ethnically homogenous city in a foreign (to them, historically) country.

I suspect the Hispanic towns in Washington are also driven by cost of living. As I understand it, they are located out in the middle of nowhere. But my knowledge dates from 1992, so this may no longer be true.

Any sense of where to get the source data?

I wonder what the first principal eigenvector looks like.

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

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.

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?

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.

I've only visited there from Raleigh and never followed through with finding a job. Probably wouldn't be our cup of tea, overall.

However, the map for Wake County confirms the mass influx of people that have been moving to the area as of late (well, in the past decade):

http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-in...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

People are moving to New York and Dallas.

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