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Migration trends in U.S. metro areas
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 1024core 8y agoThis does not seem to account for retirement. I bet that most of the people moving to Phoenix, for example, are retirees. Why would you want to retire in the snow in NY? Plus, the taxes in NY are much more than in Phoenix or Florida.
- mc32 8y agoDo you expect an upsurge in retirement? Otherwise it should be a pretty steady rate, year-to-year, no, unless major companies with major layoffs favoring seniors happened in those regions this year...
- closeparen 8y agoYes, the population is aging and retirees are a rapidly-growing segment.
- 1986 8y agoThe boomer generation is retiring now, no?
- mc32 8y agoYes, but they all didn't grow up in three main regions, nor during a narrow time window. In other words, if this were solely due to retirement, I'd expect to see a more gradual increase and in more places.
- B0btheBuilder 8y agoConsidering that NYC, Chicago, and LA are the three biggest cities in the country, I would say, yes, quite a few of them grew up in these regions. If anything, boomers would be the only generation that could afford living comfortably in said regions.
- mc32 8y agoYeah but parent said "now", and I would not expect a big jump. You may be including retiring "now" + already retired [who no longer want to or can afford those places and also are moving].
- 1986 8y agoYeah, to be clear, I don't think this is the only contributor - I'd imagine taxes and cost of living definitely have an impact, among others. I do think some of these factors might work in concert too though - it's not difficult to envision people entering retirement, who own their abode in gentrifying areas and have seen property values (and taxes) go up, deciding to sell and see that money go further in a lower-cost-of-living area.
- rayiner 8y agoI suspect you’ll see more of this as legacy public sector structures force taxes to go up in these cities. Texas is great. Low cost housing, low taxes, good schools. You can be a regular person in these cities and buy a house with a pool in a decent school district.
- brian-armstrong 8y agoAnd very low cost to oppressing minorities too :)
- wbl 8y agoBlacks in Texas do better in school then in Wisconsin. https://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html https://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-b...
- Robotbeat 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised. A lot of blacks in the Midwest are Jim Crow refugees and thus haven't had as much time to develop community support systems and generational wealth. Also, Texas is very diverse.
- rayiner 8y agoHispanic students also do better in Texas than pretty much everywhere else in the country.
- albertop 8y agoNot for long. Most of transplants are form CA.
- csnewb 8y agoI'm a Bay Area resident but visited Austin for the first time over the weekend. It's an amazing city, but the locals were openly unhappy about any more Californians moving there. Seems like there's already a big ex-CA population.
- wharnal 8y agoTitle is misleading--the article only discusses metro areas. I'm interested in seeing the stats within city limits.
- dajohnson89 8y agoCensus data, which might form a part of the data used for this article, typically includes a proper superset of the city limit. e.g., for NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#Metropolitan_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area#Met...
- dang 8y agoOk, we've replaced that title with more representative language from the article.
- throwaway98121 8y agoAny place with career opportunities means exorbitant housing costs and other taxes. Regardless of your politics, there’s a real wealth disparity, and increased demand is only driving up costs. I don’t know what the solution is, but the first step is acknowledging the problem.
- astrodust 8y agoTaxes 20% higher wouldn't matter so much if your rent isn't 5000% higher than in other states. It's housing costs that are strangling these cities.
- keerthiko 8y agoOkay housing prices are crazy, but 5000% is a bit of a stretch even between the cheapest city's median 1br and the most expensive city's median 1br. I'd say closer to 900-1200%. The problem is compounded by this: while there's a lot of upward mobility in certain industry careers in these cities, the normal-person jobs have roughly the same returns as anywhere else in the country. But the housing doesn't have that kind of distribution, it's heavily skewed to be commensurate with the particularly high income folk.
- astrodust 8y agoIt's still a staggering amount compared to any marginal increase in tax.
- barry-cotter 8y agoThere’s no engineering reason hosing in these areas can’t grow as fast as jobs. Tokyo’s population has tripled over the last twenty years while rent has been pretty much flat. Seattle has produced way more hosing lately and house prices have crashed. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/why-are-seattle-area-home-prices-falling-now-sorting-out-the-myths-and-the-facts/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/why-are-se...
- 8y ago
- cenal 8y agoThe Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was engineered to do this. Punish blue state earners with higher taxes. These folks flee into red states and hopefully bring some jobs with them.
- maccio92 8y agoPunish in this context means reduce the amount of state taxes they can deduct from federal taxes - in effect increasing their tax rate. Isn't it predominantly "blue" people asking for more taxes for more social programs? Sounds like they got what they were asking for..
- cheez 8y agoThey want other people to pay increased taxes.
- kasey_junk 8y agoMost federal social programs are spent in red states.
- manfredo 8y agoMost poor people live in red States. This is effectively pointing out that our government spending is progressive.
- tptacek 8y agoThat may be true in percentage terms, but it definitely appears not to be true in the absolute terms that would predict spending. States with households below the poverty line are, as you'd expect, dominated by the most populous states, which tend to be blue states.
- gameswithgo 8y agoBlue person here. I would be asking for the social programs, things like, educating children, to get more money. For me to have to PAY more money, but for those social programs to get less money, is not at all what I would be after, no. This is such an obvious distinction that it would lead me to assume you are not arguing in good faith. If that is not correct I would appreciate your expounding on your views more so I understand you.
- EricE 8y agoUgh - stay out of Vegas you dumb Californias. I wouldn't care if the transplants were content to assimilate. Oh no, they want to set up the same brain-dead policies that caused them to want to leave to the places they are moving from, fowling them too.
- BadassFractal 8y agoHow do you feel about living in Vegas in general? Besides everything being cheaper, how does the lifestyle compare to living in SoCal?
- dang 8y agoUncivil comments like this will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
- mc32 8y agoThis article is light on details but I think this is as close as it comes to telling us why: "Soaring home prices and high local taxes are pushing local residents out and scaring off potential movers from other parts of the country." It would make sense that as other parts of the country build out their attraction for talent, that talent is being syphoned away from high cost areas to lower cost areas with similar benefits but higher satisfaction, be it housing affordability, access to education, return on tax investment, etc. In other words, once tech becomes mainstream outside the tech hotbeds, these surging regions will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, [primary] education, etc., if they can now make a good living in other areas too.
- vmchale 8y ago> will begin to attract that talent which may not be happy about costs, education I don't think it's obvious that some of these areas will be able to provide the same quality education.
- mc32 8y agoThose three main metros listed are not known to have great school districts [they do have a few great [primary] schools which do well, but are the exception].
- barry-cotter 8y agoIt’s not about the quality of education. The educational institutes post date the industry cluster. Paris was a centre of fashion before fashion was studied in universities, ditto Nee York. Los Angeles was the place for movies in the states for three or four decades before film schools existed. New York was the home of American finance long before commerce or finance were more university centred than apprenticeship, if that’s even true now. Agglomeration economies of expertise lead to large, deep labour markets. I doubt California is much behind Boston in biotech research but the industry is all in the BosWash corridor, mostly near Boston.
- mc32 8y ago
- hitsthings 8y ago"fleeing" is quite emotional, but given that this excludes natural growth, I don't see what's surprising or bad here. Crowded places need a constant flow of people leaving to avoid overcrowding. What do the numbers look like when births are included?
- zuminator 8y agoArguably LA, Chicago and NYC are fairly saturated metro areas already, and for them to be experiencing outmigration is a desirable safety valve. What's not being shown here is whether there's an actual net population loss in these regions. If there is, I suspect it's minimal.
- barry-cotter 8y agoThis is insane. Any of these cities could fit 25m within city limits if they just upzoned. Shanghai has 25m and half the municipality is farmland or two or three story buildings.
- max76 8y agoIt would require more than just upzoning to increase the population of a city to 25m. NYC's subway, for example, would need significant improvements to support that kind of population.
- philsnow 8y agoThe tax base grows with population growth. The advantages of subways and other mass transit are strongest with denser populations.
- el_nahual 8y agoThis is false for Chicago, which had a million (!) more people in the 1950s than it has today. Vast swaths of the south side are vacant, and residents of homes in abandoned blocks can famously buy plots of land for a dollar (plus taxes).
- Trisell 8y agoBoise is a prime example of political refugees running to a place because they love the current policies. And then voting in people who enacted the types of policies that they ran away from. The district I live in went completely Democrat for the first time in its history. It’s also making house unaffordable. My small 1100 sq ft house has appreciated almost 60% in 4 years. I couldn’t afford to move into something bigger even if I wanted to. Oh and traffic that’s getting fun because our city planners are about 10 years behind on city planning. But it’s still better then San Francisco or LA. And our crime rate is still super low...For now.
- skh 8y agoAre you sure they run there because they love the current policies? Do you know that they didn’t move there in spite of the current policies? The housing policy that is causing a lot of distortion in California was enacted decades ago. The people migrating to Boise aren’t old folks are they? People younger than 50 didn’t have much to do with the famous property tax proposition in California.
- Trisell 8y agoMost of them are under 45 I would say. Most I talk to are coming here running from either California’s political policies(guns, taxes) or Portland because it got to weird and crime is to high. We have some of the lowest metro crime rates in the US. So that’s a big draw to. But Boise is definitely moving blue. Which is what’s cause the rub between the people who have lived here and those moving in. Even though a lot of people see Idaho as a backwards messed up state(and trust me it is in a lot of ways). The people who have been here outside of the last 5 years when it has exploded are pretty resentful of the growth. For all of these issues it’s still a wonderful place to live. But that might change in the next 10 years.
- r00fus 8y agoIs it moving blue or have the GOP just moved deeper (crazy) red? Maybe “blue” really means they’re more left-libertarian and don’t feel the GOP is a sane choice?
- TomMckenny 8y ago>Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, the three areas with a triple-digit daily exodus Yet those cities showed continuous rise in housing costs over the same period. Example: LA housing costs rose roughly 7% in the period it lost roughly 100,000 residents > Honolulu, San Jose, New York and Bridgeport, CT lost the highest shares of their residents to other parts of the country. Yet San Jose housing costs have risen 16% in the last year. And I note even Flint Michigan has had a 9% cost increase over the last year. What could possibly explain this?
- rcpt 8y agoLand speculation, majority low income people leaving, interest rate adjustments
- smelendez 8y agoRelatedly, families with children being replaced by young professionals. Imagine a lower middle class family of five, two working parents and three kids, in a 3-bedroom place. They get priced out and are replaced by three upper middle class engineers with no kids, sharing an apartment.
- muzz 8y agoThe population loss is the domestic portion. There is a much larger population gain from international migration inwards (in general, this past year that wasn't the case in places like the Bay Area, but overall). Also, the composition of the domestic migration. In general, lower income workers move out to other states (these are more in number), and higher income workers move in from other states. Not the best article, but here is a recent one: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-census-migration-20181221-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-census-mig...
- niftich 8y agoIt'd be useful to study the pairwise origin and destination of the domestic moves. That would lend insight into whether the gains posted by Sunbelt metros are largely of the rural-to-urban nature (or small metro to large metro, but still nearby), or whether most domestic arrivals are coming from places further away, from other regions of the country. After all, the former kind is the usual urban concentration we've seen for a while, while the latter might be indicative of broader demographic trends like the Great Northward Migration, or the first Sunbelt Boom.
- unionemployee 8y agoThe scariest thing about Texas growth to me is the insane sprawl that seems to go unchecked in the state. Massive roads lined with gas stations, chain restaurants and big box stores, surrounded by cheaply built homes with four cars in the driveway/garage, just everywhere. It makes me want to leave the country.
- ars 8y agoThat sounds amazing, I might want to move. Why does it bother you how other people want to live? Not everyone wants to live in an Arcology. If you want to, then go for it but let other people live as they want.
- screye 8y agoObjectively speaking, sprawl is about as inefficient as urban design gets. It makes it nearly impossible to have walkable area around which smaller and more organic experiences can develop. It also makes o very hard to develop any kind of community. Then there are the economic implications sprawl. It makes the city instantly dependant on cars and roads for everything. Things such as school transportation, policing and emergency response also become more expensive, as fewer people inhabit the region per mile. It is like buying a pickup truck for everyday commutes. Sure, you can do it if you like it. But objectively speaking it is rather inefficient.
- rcpt 8y agoAre you in Europe or something? Just about every city in the United States is surrounded by single family homes and freeways with the same chain stores repeated every few miles. It's really hard to not find what you're looking for.
- unionemployee 8y agoIt isn’t. Your footprint becomes much smaller once you get out of your car. There are walkable/bikable areas all over the place that are livable, but they may not stand out if one isn’t looking for them.
- allengeorge 8y agoA couple of things are unclear from the article (for NYC specifically, and, more generally): 1. Does NYC still lose people after accounting for the effects of international migrant inflows? 2. What are the education levels of the people leaving the city? 3. Are they referring to the city only, or the metro area (which, IIRC, can stretch into Westchester and parts of Jersey)?
- Nelkins 8y agoFor NYC, it appears the city is growing when considering international migration (subject to various caveats about quality of data). More detailed information can be found here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/current-future-populations.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...