There are a few things in the chart that just seem... odd. For example, it says that Boston is losing people (EXCEPT for less than high school graduates) to almost the same degree as Detroit is. That just doesn't seem right to me whether it's the Biotech buildings going up all over Cambridge or the real estate prices which I think I can safely assume are a lot higher than Detroit's. (Not picking on Detroit but for those who may not be as familiar with US cities, it's pretty much the poster child for urban decay right now.)

Yea... I am not sure I understand the Boston metric on this chart right now. Boston+Cambridge are in a huge development boom. Residences and offices are going up all over the place and the project pipeline over the next 2 to 3 years is filled with a ton of stuff.

If Wikipedia is to be believed Boston added 18K people between 2010 and 2012. Between 2000 and 2010 it added 29,000. I think I also heard recently somewhere that in 2012 to 2014 Boston added another 10 - 15K people. The only thing I can think is Boston is being considered more than just Boston-proper but is including the entire Metro-west.

I think they are counting the graduating students as residents.

Not helping: I think they've done an exceptionally poor job of clarifying how they defined the metropolitan areas. For example, the label for the data in the Boston area (lifted off the map, which was the only place I could find the slightest mention) is "Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH". Grouping MA and NH?! Conversely, Riverside and Los Angeles are separated despite covering a similar geographic range. I'd love to see the geographic regions in this study shown as polygons on a map, along with some sense of the total population per region.

They did an exceptionally poor job of defining metro areas. Separating Greenville and Spartanburg SC is dubious on its own but defining "Greenville" as the unimaginably small city plus the two smallest suburbs is a bit ludicrous. I know several companies that have individually relocated more employees to the region than this map credits for the whole metro area.

South Carolina has some weird outliers in terms of city limits and Greenville is one of them. The city itself is only 26.1 square miles and is mostly commercially zoned.

Cupertino and southern Marin County, Tracy and San Francisco have a similar geographic range. Are they grouped together? These are all quite different places to be. A lot of arbitrary choices need to be made when dividing areas. It's good to see what choices those were and why they were made.

NYC is very large so will look disproportionately more affected when comparison is expressed in absolute values. I'd be curious to see these numbers per capita.

To further this point 30k/nyc pop is about equal to 10k / Chicago pop, making them about equal per-capita. And yet Chicago looks like a much smaller migration.

This surprised me too. Anyone from New York care to comment?

I feel like this could be due to how they define 'New York Metro'. I see a lot of people (myself included) moving out of New York City proper and moving to much much cheaper areas like New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester County, etc. This is especially true for recent college grads who simply cannot afford to live comfortably in the city while working at an "entry level" job. I feel like many of us in the tech sector forget this since we,overall, have a decent starting salary in our field, and the "First job out of college" is frequently not the first job in the industry. In other industries the your first job will pay not too much over minimum wage, especially if the field isn't competitive.

So while the data may show people leaving New York, it may not tell the whole picture. My own experience shows otherwise, though I am aware that anecdotes are not data. People may be moving out of New York City, but they aren't leaving New York City.

Does anyone have a guess as to who all of these people are who are moving into these expensive metro areas? I read the same thing about Seattle, that it's too expensive to live comfortably in the city so people are moving to the bordering suburbs (like Shoreline or Burien), yet the city grew faster than the suburbs over the past couple of years. Is this a case of "nobody goes there, it's too crowded" or am I missing a link somewhere?

This is measuring domestic migration, New York City's growth is primarily international migration.

Here's an article from the same guys explaining the difference:

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/04/2-very-different-mig...

Well I say "a lot of people" but its still a minority. Most people do stay in the city, live with roommates, etc. 30k people is an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to NYC's 8 million residents. On top of that, There are a lot of people who move into the city who already have established careers and have a well paying job lined up, or moved out of the city after college and then moved back after they've moved into higher paying positions.

On top of that there is a lot of international money moving into New York, as another commenter mentioned, and generally into the 2+br apartments with a family, further driving up the cost of living even with a roommate in the "safe" areas.

I am not from New York. But I immediately thought of this recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7904567

there's a staggering amount of people in New York.