High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places
citylab.com
citylab.com
Is that really the best way he could think of to present that data?
Both the chart and the map are virtually unreadable if you want to get an idea of the movement patterns in relation to education.
And it doesn't help that it's not scaled by the size of the cities, instead showing the absolute number of the change.
I think this map does a fine job of showing movement patterns in relation to education:
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/06/Migrat...
It most definitely does not. It does a mediocre job of showing movement patterns, and a terrible job of relating them to education.
To show movement patterns it needs to show relative change, not absolute change.
To show education changes it needs a completely different format. (And that's not a map.)
But if you are making a chart, or making circles then you have to.
To see this, look at a large-circle city. Now imagine that same city has two neighborhoods, and you list them separately, now suddenly your large circle becomes two small circles, or the top-ranking city on your chart is suddenly a middling city
Yet nothing actually changed in how people move!
Their findings also very conveniently align with the overall views of the Atlantic.
If Wikipedia is to be believed Boston added 18K people between 2010 and 2012. Between 2000 and 2010 it added 29,000. I think I also heard recently somewhere that in 2012 to 2014 Boston added another 10 - 15K people. The only thing I can think is Boston is being considered more than just Boston-proper but is including the entire Metro-west.
South Carolina has some weird outliers in terms of city limits and Greenville is one of them. The city itself is only 26.1 square miles and is mostly commercially zoned.
So while the data may show people leaving New York, it may not tell the whole picture. My own experience shows otherwise, though I am aware that anecdotes are not data. People may be moving out of New York City, but they aren't leaving New York City.
Here's an article from the same guys explaining the difference:
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/04/2-very-different-mig...
On top of that there is a lot of international money moving into New York, as another commenter mentioned, and generally into the 2+br apartments with a family, further driving up the cost of living even with a roommate in the "safe" areas.
The article doesn't address that, only noting:
> [...] immigrants continue to flow into places like New York and Los Angeles. But these places are seeing a net loss of Americans of all education levels.
> San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami all saw their ranks of educated residents grow and less educated residents shrink.
New York is growing even as the map says it's shrinking because it's the number one destination of foreign immigrants. We'd need to know a lot about foreign migration levels and education to make the kind of conclusions people are proposing from this map.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/06/Migrat...
Three shades of blue, thick white borders around bars, I can barely see the colors.
Is there a place I can get the raw data?
You can look at this two ways: one is pure physics... particles in a high pressure zone tend to move towards a low pressure zone. In human terms, people can be moving from more-crowded to less-crowded. That may not be the only reason, but the density gradient is high enough that this could be a significant factor that clouds other factors.
The other way to look at it is that there are simply more people in the North East who are moving at any given time, and it's likely that there are more people moving out of the region at any time than there are people moving out of less dense regions. That can make it look like a significant flight from the NE, when really it's a random bias effect of the relative densities.
There are plenty of congested and expensive places, mostly big coastal cities. If your view of "everywhere" only includes those places, then it will seem like "everywhere" is congested and expensive. But if you ever drive across Wyoming, Texas, Montana, or Kansas, you'll see plenty of wiiiiiiiide open space too. $50k will get you a decent house in small-town Kansas.
The USA is not China, where what you say is actually true (lack of arable land, resources, overcrowded cities, not much ability to build new cities because all the good space is already taken).
Immigration is usually just moving people around from resource-starved places to resource-rich places. So from a planetary perspective, it is a good thing.
Moving people from poor places to rich places increases the environmental impacts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-NtQr89u4
Anyway, "moving people around" is not a useful way to look at American immigration. The numbers of people overseas who would move here are effectively infinite.
A billion is really not a problem for a country as resource rich as the USA. We already produce much of the world's food, and our biggest problems usually amount to not being able to water our Kentucky bluegrass lawns whenever we want to. Even if we forget about much of the dry west, we still have lots of space (and the west actually isn't that dry...).
Immigration is a great way of allowing for global social mobility. I hate the mentality of the "we got ours, screw the rest of you" mindset of the anti-immigration types. It is not only selfish, but morally wrong.
And major lol at the idea that Japanese have a quality of life comparable to Americans. They commute over an hour one way to tiny apartments and enjoy spacious neighborhood outdoor recreation facilities such as this: http://treasureheart.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/3/3/1833287/3026...
Clearly we haven't broken 300 million without problems. Quite obviously we've had an explosion of sprawl and loss of open space. We've had massive growth in infrastructure demands. It's very easy to argue that most major urban areas have seen a major decline in quality of life for the middle class.
I've been to Japan a few times and found my friends there had quite good lives. Ya, they don't get to waste as much as we do, but their apartments are cozy, they prefer higher quality things, the trains ARE VERY efficient, the commutes are not that bad for most people. Also, not everyone lives in Tokyo.
We haven't lost that much open space, and the American I knew 20 years ago is still pretty much intact today. I just got back from a two week trip to Seattle and not much had changed, the traffic was a bit worse, but nothing like Beijing.