Wouldn't scaling by the size of the cities make it even harder to judge where people are actually going or moving away from? Maybe you're looking for something different in the data than I am, but it seems like that would obscure the most important numbers.
It depends on what you do. If you are coloring the whole US by movement then use the absolute values.
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
If you look at a map of population density, the North East, as a region, has the highest density. (LA is probably similar, but it's a much smaller area.)
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.
In 30 years there will be nowhere left to run. If current rates of immigration continue we're looking at over 400 million crammed in. Everywhere will be congested and expensive.
400 million in a country the size of the US is not exactly "crammed in".
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 wide open places where there is no major city lack major cities because they are unsuitable sites. There isn't enough fresh water and/or the energy demands of logistics are unfeasible. Newsflash: we are not building brand new urban areas, and we won't be. People will continue to increase congestion and sprawl at the existing metropolitan areas. The ecology and quality of life will continue to degrade.
There is plenty of fresh water and infrastructure in Kansas...it is not Nevada! We can probably double the number of cities in the USA no problem; we have the resources, we just lack the people.
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).
The carrying capacity of the USA at our current standard of living (resource consumption) is probably around 1 billion people, more if we can use our resources more efficiently (which is bound to happen in the future).
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.
You are delusional. Two separate congressional commissions in the 70s and the 90s concluded the long term sustainable population of the USA is under 200 million.
Moving people from poor places to rich places increases the environmental impacts.
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.
200 million is ridiculous and obviously not true as we've already broken 300 million without any problems. Japan supports around 130 million people with an American-level lifestyle..it is much smaller with ALOT less arable land (the interior are all mountains!).
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.
Japan is a global shipping or energy crisis away from utter catastrophe. You really think that's a situation we should shoot for? Japan is wisely choosing to lower its population.
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.
Japan is anti-immigration (many are xenophobic) but they are not trying to lower their population. The government is trying to encourage more babies if anything.
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.
They're welcome to come down to Georgia. The only thing that made me want to leave was not having marriage equality, and that'll be solved in 0-2 years.
I'm curious why Los Angeles has an increase in Bachelor degrees but a significant decrease in levels above and below.
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.
I feel like this could be due to how they define 'New York Metro'. I see a lot of people (myself included) moving out of New York City proper and moving to much much cheaper areas like New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester County, etc. This is especially true for recent college grads who simply cannot afford to live comfortably in the city while working at an "entry level" job. I feel like many of us in the tech sector forget this since we,overall, have a decent starting salary in our field, and the "First job out of college" is frequently not the first job in the industry. In other industries the your first job will pay not too much over minimum wage, especially if the field isn't competitive.
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.
Does anyone have a guess as to who all of these people are who are moving into these expensive metro areas? I read the same thing about Seattle, that it's too expensive to live comfortably in the city so people are moving to the bordering suburbs (like Shoreline or Burien), yet the city grew faster than the suburbs over the past couple of years. Is this a case of "nobody goes there, it's too crowded" or am I missing a link somewhere?
Well I say "a lot of people" but its still a minority. Most people do stay in the city, live with roommates, etc. 30k people is an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to NYC's 8 million residents. On top of that, There are a lot of people who move into the city who already have established careers and have a well paying job lined up, or moved out of the city after college and then moved back after they've moved into higher paying positions.
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.
NYC is very large so will look disproportionately more affected when comparison is expressed in absolute values. I'd be curious to see these numbers per capita.
To further this point 30k/nyc pop is about equal to 10k / Chicago pop, making them about equal per-capita. And yet Chicago looks like a much smaller migration.
There are a few things in the chart that just seem... odd. For example, it says that Boston is losing people (EXCEPT for less than high school graduates) to almost the same degree as Detroit is. That just doesn't seem right to me whether it's the Biotech buildings going up all over Cambridge or the real estate prices which I think I can safely assume are a lot higher than Detroit's. (Not picking on Detroit but for those who may not be as familiar with US cities, it's pretty much the poster child for urban decay right now.)
Yea... I am not sure I understand the Boston metric on this chart right now. Boston+Cambridge are in a huge development boom. Residences and offices are going up all over the place and the project pipeline over the next 2 to 3 years is filled with a ton of stuff.
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.
Not helping: I think they've done an exceptionally poor job of clarifying how they defined the metropolitan areas. For example, the label for the data in the Boston area (lifted off the map, which was the only place I could find the slightest mention) is "Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH". Grouping MA and NH?! Conversely, Riverside and Los Angeles are separated despite covering a similar geographic range. I'd love to see the geographic regions in this study shown as polygons on a map, along with some sense of the total population per region.
Cupertino and southern Marin County, Tracy and San Francisco have a similar geographic range. Are they grouped together? These are all quite different places to be. A lot of arbitrary choices need to be made when dividing areas. It's good to see what choices those were and why they were made.
They did an exceptionally poor job of defining metro areas. Separating Greenville and Spartanburg SC is dubious on its own but defining "Greenville" as the unimaginably small city plus the two smallest suburbs is a bit ludicrous. I know several companies that have individually relocated more employees to the region than this map credits for the whole metro area.
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.
Hmm. Separating Los Angeles and Riverside seemed pretty strange to me. I mean, yes, they're 60 miles apart, but in the LA basin, people commute that far all the time.
If Cupertino and Marin are considered the same, and Tracy and San Francisco, I would agree. But they are very different places to be in, LA and Riverside.
This map is useless. It shows net domestic migration, but has no information on international arrivals.
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.
I really question their methods. The Boston area for example has exploded with biotech and finance companies over the last 10-15 years, and high tech and big pharma have moved in as well more recently. People are also constantly complaining about lack of affordable housing, which would lead me to believe that lesser educated people are being priced out of the market and are likely leaving, not coming in droves.
Their findings also very conveniently align with the overall views of the Atlantic.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIs 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!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7904567
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.
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.
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?
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.
Their findings also very conveniently align with the overall views of the Atlantic.