The Washington Post recently reported that in any given year, about 8.5 million people move from one metropolitan area to another within the United States — from the Washington, D.C., region up to New York, or from New York to Philadelphia and farther away. These major moves — distinct from the kind you make across town, or even from the city to the suburbs — make up a relatively small share of all migration. Only about one in five movers today decamps for another metro area entirely.
But these moves are where the metro bragging rights lie. Think New York is so much better than Washington? The Washington Post reporter says then why do more than 16,000 New Yorkers move down here every year? (That is, ahem, about 0.08 percent of the metro New York population!)
Based on new five-year American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau, the paper plotted annual migration totals among the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. New Yorkers — another 27,000 of them — also flock to Philadelphia each year. And, more surprisingly, 22,000 New Yorkers head to Miami, an unusually large migration for two metros 1,300 miles apart.
It looks like a lot of people are leaving New York — more, in fact, than move there from these other cities. But the population New York starts with is larger, too (so, relative to metropolitan Philadelphia’s size, more people still move from Philly to New York than the other way around).
Original article by Christopher Ingraham and Emily Badger with The Washington Post.
