Where Americans Are Moving

I live in the Washington D.C. area which is probably the most transient area in America.  People come here for the jobs, then often leave for greener pastures.  The come-and-go is constant, which is great for meeting new and interesting people, but difficult when it comes to establishing long term friendships. 

Americans are constantly on the move, and people are constantly coming to America.  I think both of these things are good.  But where are Americans moving?  I recently did a post that included tools to check how much the population of your area has changed. 

My friends at ESRI have a new map that I discovered that is slightly different, it shows where Americans are moving to, specifically in the past year.  (*Note – ESRI makes more sophisticated mapping sites that aren’t always optimized for phones. I highly suggest using this site on a full computer or at least a tablet.) 

So let’s check it out!

 

The Map

When you launch it you’ll see this.

 

Beautiful colors eh?  Notice the legend on the left simply lists the 4 regions of America and has an extra category noting “from a foreign country”.  If you click on a county at this scale you’ll see something like this:

 

I randomly clicked on Kane County, Utah and it shows a graph that details the number of people who moved to Kane County from each of the 4 regions of America, or from overseas, in the past year.  In this case most came from the West. (*Note, you have to hover your mouse over each of the bars in the graph to see the display that shows the number)

Like the last ESRI map I highlighted, these data are scale dependent.  So when you zoom in you get more detailed data. 

 

More Detail

Let’s look at my ultra-transient home, the Washington D.C. area…

 

Aha, you’ll notice that when you zoom past a certain scale of detail the maps changes to colored graduated circles (I’m using dorky cartography terms…).  But the colors are the same as the legend I showed earlier and map to the 4 regions of America with a color for “from a foreign country” (purple). 

The legend did change though to show the extra information the map conveys, mainly the number of people.  So the relative size of the circle equates to the number of people who have moved to that location from the place that the color denotes.  Got it? 

Here’s what the new legend looks like:

 

You may be asking “Why would the D.C. area have so many people moving from foreign countries on the west side and not the east.”  Well that’s a simple answer, the West part of the image is the Virginia side, and the East is the Maryland side. 

Plain and simple, Maryland taxes businesses at an extremely high rate and Virginia doesn’t.  Therefore, Virginia has all the good jobs (especially tech jobs, including the new Amazon HQ2), and Maryland doesn’t.  That’s a broad generalization but mostly true. 

Lastly, using more ninja cartography tricks, you’ll notice that when you zoom in even further the legend resorts back to the original version and the data are shown by detailed census tract and block.  The folks at ESRI are sneaky.

 

Storymap

ESRI also created a “storymap” out of this data, which you can access here.  Simply scroll slowly down the page and they’ll show cool patterns and trends in the data. 

For instance, many of the people who moved to Florida are snowbirds from the North (surprise surprise), and 38% of those who moved to California came from a foreign country. 

So have a hoot exploring this wonderful map, I found all kinds of interesting and intriguing things that sometimes made sense but often did not. 

I post lots of tools like this that show various aspects of money and finance from a location perspective.  If you’re considering Geoarbitrage in the United States this mapping tool can help you figure out your perfect place based on data you might not have considered. 

Also be sure to check out my Geoarbitrage Resources Page that has tons of great tools to help you find your perfect location.

I hope you find these resources handy and I will continue to expose valuable tools that can help when deciding on a geoarbitrage strategy.