Very cool :)

Took me a while to realize what this is.

When I first saw Walker’s migration circle (which he built using D3.js), it looked like a jumble that was impossible to untangle, but that’s before I realized it was interactive. If you haven’t already, mouse over the graphic to display information from single states to see where people from that state moved to last year, and where the people who moved into that state came from. More than 7 million Americans moved within the country, so if you’re looking for a time sink, you’ll find it in this circle.

“I think we can learn a lot from migration patterns,” Walker wrote in an email. “In a way, migration flows are one of the oldest forms of crowdsourcing. They tell you which geographies the crowd deems to be low-opportunity, and which the crowd deems to be high-opportunity.”

I live in California, so I started there. I love this state, and it seems to me people are moving here all the time. But it turns out, more people are leaving (73,345 more). As you can see in the snapshot to the right, Californians don’t usually stray too far though, tending to migrate to other western states. Or Texas. A likely explanation for the outflux is that you could buy a mansion in some parts of the country for the same amount as a 2 bed, 1 bath house in the Bay Area.

Despite the initial jumble, a couple things jump out before you even begin interacting with the graphic. A lot of people are moving out of New York (135,793 net loss) and ending up all over the place, including the other side of the country. The same is true for the Midwest, with people mostly landing in the Southeast, Southwest and California. These trends are clearer when you look at individual states, but the broader trends would be easier to grasp if you could mouse over the region names to see where, say, everyone in the Northeast moved.

One thing to note as you look at what’s happening with New York, for example, is that only exchanges of at least 10,000 people are depicted. This, Walker says in his blog post, is to keep the graphic from becoming to messy. So, while many people are moving into New York, most of them aren’t shown because they are coming from many different places in smaller numbers.

Some of the other things Walker noticed include that fact that a lot of people are moving to Florida, many of them likely retirees. “Interestingly the state contributing the most migrants to Florida is neighboring Georgia,” Walker wrote in his blog. “Texas, New York and North Carolina are the next largest contributors.”

Oops. Forgot to indicate that it was interactive. I started with Rhode Island, where I grew up. It makes sense that traffic between MA is the foremost frequent and biggest for RI.  In fact, that's what I did too!