American Migration

Forbes has a very nice interactive map showing migration within the USA. Click on any county and you can see where people are coming from (in blue) and where they are leaving for (in red.) Hover over a county to get the specific numbers. Clicking the year under the bar chart will give you the figures from that year.

Data is from the IRS and a more detailed description can be found here. You can see the effects of the housing bubble when comparing 2005 to 2009 in certain cities, especially Las Vegas which went from mostly blue to an almost even split. The per capita income figures are also shown for each county. This shows that many cities and other areas are exporting wealth and importing poverty. Click the map above and explore.

Map of the Week Miscellany for September, 2011

There's a lot going on this week and if I only didn't have to work I could devote more time to these posts and make them more meaningful but be careful what you wish for. Anyway here are a few interesting items I've found this week:

An Army Corps of Engineers map of the flood control structures in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

 The manual this map appears in describes how the levees in Wilkes Barre and across the river in Kingston can form a bottleneck and make flooding worse for communities downstream. In 1972 these walls were too short to contain the flow from Tropical Storm Agnes and the city was flooded. The water stored from this flooding helped spare downstream places like Sunbury. Since then the levees have been raised, partially sparing Wilkes Barre from this weekend's floods (though water did get in by seeping under the levees.)

This sent more water to downstream places like Bloomsburg, where record setting flooding occurred.


Below is a map from the AP showing the some of the worst hit places.

Daniel Huffman's wonderful river schematic map shows how these places interconnect.

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Other Miscellaneous Notes:
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Tomorrow night (September 15th) David Byrne will squish an inflatable globe under the High Line in New York City. It will be there until October 1st. To sort of quote one of his songs "this was a parking lot, now it's all covered in globe." More information is available from New York Magazine.

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From LA Taco ("Celebrating the taco lifestyle in Los Angeles") comes this chart showing the population growth of the largest cities in the USA. 

We're Number 5!

As children, we knew our city was the fourth largest and that it would always be that way. Then in 1990 something awful happened-Houston moved ahead of us. Still, we could take solace in the fact that our metropolitan area was number 4 and Houston only got ahead by swallowing up a bunch of suburbs. Now that the Census 2010 verdict is in we are number 5 on all counts and just barely hanging on. These maps from the Philadelphia Inquirer illustrate our angst.

 Dallas? Are they counting by number of parking spaces?

Using county based metropolitan areas creates some size anomalies and makes the maps look a bit goofy. Riverside? Why do they even get their own metropolitan area? It looks like they're including San Bernardino county also, making for one huge skyscraper that is mostly desert.

The north facing perspective also means losing San Francisco and Baltimore behind their larger "neighbors" but if you flipped it around you'd lose San Diego so something had to give. Of course all of this seems pretty insignificant when compared with the largest cities in the world. A little perspective goes a long way.

Map of the Week-US Population Change

It's that time again when redistricting claims much of my time at work. I don't work directly with the overall US population figures, but I've been exposed to lots of ugly, poorly designed maps showing population change across the country. This map from Brookings Institute Demographer William H. Frey is one of the better ones though it's not clear if he's using the final 2010 Census figures or one of the estimates.

The resulting patterns are fairly predictable and consistent with previous decades. The ring around Minneapolis nicely exemplifies the exurban migration that may finally be starting to ebb a bit. The continuing growth of areas with the poorest access to fresh water is not really news but shows up clearly.

What is interesting is how many counties are losing population. The population loss in the Great Plains is old news but the huge number of counties in the less than 10% loss category is surprising. Unfortunately the pattern is lost a bit by the dull color choice for that category.

Map of the Week-Election Cartograms

You may have heard that the US Presidential Election just is around the corner. The best way to see the true distribution of electoral votes is to use a cartogram. A cartogram is a map showing areas sized by some factor other than area (in most cases population). Cartograms are usually pretty ugly things.


They can be one-legged spiny monsters;








or they can be acid trippy lava lamps.








That's why when I'm shopping for a cartogram, I usually go with the more subdued kind that you get from a serious sedate publication like the New York Times. By the way - if these colors don't look right to you, change them! Many of these sites let you change the states to whatever color and pattern makes you happy.

Map of the Week-What is and How is Cascadia?

Attention residents of Cascadia (outlined in green on the map on the right): Sightline, a Seattle based think tank has a slew of maps showing health, environmental and economic data for your region. There are some nice animations but they don't come over well on this page so here are some static maps. On the left is the Seattle area classified by walkability and on the right is a map with pie charts showing the decline of Salmon stock in the region. For lots of other interesting maps of the region, visit their maps page.

MOTW #48

There's been lots of ballyhoo about the US Population
having reached 300 million this past week. Here is a pretty cool
interactive map from MSNBC's web site. There's a timeline on the
bottom so you can see population change through history and lots of info
when you scroll around the states. I had trouble with this in Internet
Exploder but it worked great in the Netscape/Firefox world. Happy
mapping!