County Migration

August 16, 2007 10:58 PM

This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income. [via]
posted by tellurian (19 comments total)

Amazing! Excellent post!!
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 11:04 PM on August 16, 2007

Fascinating! I was surprised to find that almost as many people moved to where I used to live in California from where I now live in Texas as the reverse. Given the vastly different costs of living, this was quite interesting to me.
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:18 PM on August 16, 2007

Hey! That's pretty damn cool!
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 11:19 PM on August 16, 2007

Indeed, thank you. This is very fascinating to a nomad like myself.
posted by AllesKlar at 11:55 PM on August 16, 2007

Hehe, that's awesome. Oh man, yeah, confirms there are lots of people moving from Travis to Bastrop county. Soon you won't be able to see any forest from 71.
posted by Mister Cheese at 11:58 PM on August 16, 2007

That UI is pure suckage on Safari and Opera. Toggling the from/to state seem to require clicking a different county than one selected the previous time. Makes it damnably difficult to compare the in/out flow for a single county.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:24 AM on August 17, 2007

Really cool analysis.

I'm not sure what's more baffling: that the net income level in San Francisco went down, or that 1,577 of the ex-residents relocated to Maricopa, AZ.

Oh, right. Real estate.
posted by down the rabbit lolz at 1:51 AM on August 17, 2007

Great post!
posted by languagehat at 5:30 AM on August 17, 2007

That is so cool. I love stuff like this.
posted by rtha at 5:39 AM on August 17, 2007

This is very cool. Now I feel like trying to find those other 431 people from my old city that now live where I live.
posted by vewystwange at 5:48 AM on August 17, 2007

Very nice find. Thanks! I work with a lot of Census data and this is a most helpful way to visualize the data.
posted by mmahaffie at 6:02 AM on August 17, 2007

I'm not sure what's more baffling: that the net income level in San Francisco went down, or that 1,577 of the ex-residents relocated to Maricopa, AZ.
Maybe they joined H.I. McDonnaugh in the Maricopa County Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:36 AM on August 17, 2007

It's fun to look through the Florida east coast counties. The previous counties are FL, FL, FL, NY, FL, NY, NJ, CT.

I guess that's not a stereotype about how all the New Yorkers move to Florida.
posted by smackfu at 6:49 AM on August 17, 2007

Cook County lost more than 300,000 people- wow.

This is gold- wish there were something similar for Canada.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 11:03 AM on August 17, 2007

This is fascinating, my county got 490 people in five years.
posted by jessamyn at 2:58 PM on August 17, 2007

One thing that struck me as I clicked around this map was that the figures for 'Foreign - Median household income - In', is often quite low and the 'Out', is much improved. It looks like "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!", may still hold true.
posted by tellurian at 12:13 AM on August 18, 2007

Um… after thinking about this for a day, that might be a misinterpretation of that statistic.
posted by tellurian at 10:32 PM on August 18, 2007

That's definitely neat, but I couldn't help wishing that they had spent a little more time tweaking the interface. Maybe I'm just not using it correctly, but it'd be really cool if you could get a nationwide view of where people were moving to and from, all on one map. I expect that there would be some interesting broad trends (I've heard that the upper Midwest is losing people).

It is interesting to look at how much "churn" there is in a typical county. I know that my home county gained a few thousand in population, but I didn't realize that it gained it by way of having some 13,000 people move out and 17,000 move in. Hearing that the 'population increased by 4,000' doesn't mean nearly the same thing.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:11 PM on August 18, 2007

Kadin2048 There was a post here a while ago that might interest you.
posted by tellurian at 5:12 PM on August 19, 2007