Last month the Census Bureau confirmed a confounding dynamic taking hold across the American landscape: Superstar cities, the nation’s economic powerhouses, hotbeds of opportunity at the cutting edge of technological progress, are losing people to other parts of the country.
As The New York Times reports, for the first time in at least a decade, 4,868 more people left King County, Washington—Amazon’s home—than arrived from elsewhere in the country. Santa Clara County, California, home to most of Silicon Valley, lost 24,645 people to domestic migration, its ninth consecutive annual loss.
The trend is becoming widespread, too. Eight of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country, including those around New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, lost people to other places in 2018. That was up from seven in 2016, five in 2013 and four in 2010.
Migration out of the New York area has gotten so intense that its total population shrank in 2018 for the second year in a row. This flow of people out of the hotbeds of innovation and economic activity underscores how lopsided the distribution of opportunity has become.
The problem is that workers without a four-year college degree don’t earn anywhere near as much as the median income in these areas.
Consider janitors. In 1960, a janitor in the Deep South could more than double his income by moving to Santa Clara County, even after accounting for higher housing costs. Since then, janitors’ earnings have grown much more slowly in Silicon Valley and King County than in the Deep South. And this is upending the distribution of prosperity across the country. Read the full story.
