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Oct 2
Interactive map of Migration in America (part of Forbes.com’s Data-Driven series): Close to 40 million Americans move from one home to another every year. Click anywhere on the map: blue counties send more migrants to the selected county than they take; red counties take more than they send An interesting exercise is contrasting an urban county (such as shown above), where migration edges leads to/from counties all across the country, with a rural county where immigration/emigration is typically much more localized. For example, here’s the migration graph for Itasca County: Might have been nice to have the map also visualize volume of migration, perhaps by changing the widths of the lines (e.g., not surprisingly, the numbers for Kings County are an order of magnitude greater than for Itasca).  More on this data/map here: Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved from one house to another last year, with 4.3 million of them moving between states. This mobility makes us efficient seekers of economic improvement—moving into, and then leaving, cities like Phoenix as their fortunes rise and fall. My interactive visualization, based on IRS data, illustrates these patterns by tracing inward and outward moves for every county in the country. Each move had its own motivations, but in aggregate they ­reflect the geographical marketplace during the boom and bust of the last decade: Migrants flock to Las Vegas in 2005 in search of cheap, luxurious housing, then flee in 2009 as the city’s economy collapses; Miami beckons retirees from the North but offers little to its working-age residents, who leave for the West. Even fast-growing boomtowns like Charlotte, N.C., lose residents to their outlying counties as the demand for exurban tract-housing pushes workers ever outward. We’ve asked four experts to give us their thoughts on the maps. Try them yourself at forbes.com/migration. The Great Human Capital Swap-Meet by Michael Conzen Vibrant Flux by Paul Kedrosky Reverse Flows to “Bubble Areas” by William Frey New Pattern or Temporary Break? by Joel Kotkin

Interactive map of Migration in America (part of Forbes.com’s Data-Driven series):

Close to 40 million Americans move from one home to another every year. Click anywhere on the map: blue counties send more migrants to the selected county than they take; red counties take more than they send

An interesting exercise is contrasting an urban county (such as shown above), where migration edges leads to/from counties all across the country, with a rural county where immigration/emigration is typically much more localized. For example, here’s the migration graph for Itasca County:

Might have been nice to have the map also visualize volume of migration, perhaps by changing the widths of the lines (e.g., not surprisingly, the numbers for Kings County are an order of magnitude greater than for Itasca). 

More on this data/map here:

Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved from one house to another last year, with 4.3 million of them moving between states. This mobility makes us efficient seekers of economic improvement—moving into, and then leaving, cities like Phoenix as their fortunes rise and fall.

My interactive visualization, based on IRS data, illustrates these patterns by tracing inward and outward moves for every county in the country. Each move had its own motivations, but in aggregate they ­reflect the geographical marketplace during the boom and bust of the last decade: Migrants flock to Las Vegas in 2005 in search of cheap, luxurious housing, then flee in 2009 as the city’s economy collapses; Miami beckons retirees from the North but offers little to its working-age residents, who leave for the West. Even fast-growing boomtowns like Charlotte, N.C., lose residents to their outlying counties as the demand for exurban tract-housing pushes workers ever outward.

We’ve asked four experts to give us their thoughts on the maps. Try them yourself at forbes.com/migration.

Posted 7 months ago

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map, maps, migration, data visualization, data, dataviz,