More On Those Canoes

There’s an interesting article at Slate about differing patterns of inmigration and outmigration among American cities. For example:

There are two types of cities in America. In some of them, the people moving in are better educated and make more money than the people moving out. In others, the opposite is true.

In the former category, we have, of course, San Francisco, where over the past 12 years the median in-migrant has earned $12,640 a year more than the median out-migrant did before he or she left. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami are also metro areas where new arrivals make, at the median, more than $5,000 more than their outgoing counterparts. There is something intuitive about this: People are liable to move away when things aren’t going well, and arrive because they’ve gotten a great job.

But it’s paired with a number of other trends that together indicate a widespread sorting occurring between metro areas where housing is expensive and wages are high and ones where they are not. San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Chicago are the cities in which in-migrants are the most likely to be more highly educated than people leaving town. New residents in these cities also tend to be younger. Their households have more earners (roommates, potentially, or working partners) and are more likely to rent than own.

but

Other U.S. cities show a different pattern. In Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, for example, people leaving tend to be earning more money than people arriving. They also tend to be better educated. This also sounds appealing, in a way, if you think of the city as an input-output machine of upward mobility. But these aren’t 19th-century immigrant metropolises. In practice, this data more likely represents a stream of ambitious and qualified people heading elsewhere.

Of the cities in that first category Chicago is the only one showing net outmigration or, “one of these things is not like the others”. It will be interesting to see how Chicago Democrats reconcile the city’s increasing gentrification and the large numbers of homicides on the South and West sides with their advance press as being the “party of the little guy”.

Also, I don’t think that urbanists should count their chickens before they’re hatched. The new residents being younger might be an advantage today but it is simply not true that they can depended on to stay in place forever. As their life circumstances change, they, like previous generations, are likely to move.