Friday, February 7, 2014

County to County Migration Data: Regional Gains and Losses

In a given year, about 6 percent of the U.S. population picks up and changes counties. Young families move from Chicago to the surrounding suburbs. Recent college graduates cross the country for a first job in Boston, or Washington, D.C. Retirees relocate for good down to the Sunbelt.

If you could track all of these moves simultaneously across time, you'd get a picture of the parts of the country that are net population gainers, and those that are losing people instead. That picture would look like this:
 

The Atlantic Cities website does a nice job of explaining the new data flow mapper available at the Census Bureau for tracking these changes in migration. I would encourage you to read their article about this new function.

In the meantime, we have seen an overall gain in migration for our region, with a net increase of 2,800 people in this new data release. Unfortunately both counties haven't seen equal good fortune however. As the table below shows, in Oneida County there was a gain of about 3,558 migrants - with other NYS counties providing the bulk of the in-migration. Herkimer County, on the other hand has seen a net migration of minus 758, with those mostly split between other NYS counties and other US states.

 
Overall, then, where are our new neighbors coming from? And where did our old neighbors go? Here's the top 10 migration patterns for in-, out-, and net-migration for each county. Note that there are separate tables for the top states people came or went to, as well as the top counties in NYS for which they did the same.