Durham's urbanity, Wake's suburb-inanity

Note: This post has been updated to correct some inaccuracies with the data in the original. Please see the Comments for details. -BCR

As a relatively recent transplant to the Triangle, I'm still fascinated by what factors into new residents' decisions on where to live in our geographically dispersed region. As I've pondered this question, I've often come back to David Rollins' casual anecdote on a listserv a few months back stating that most of his co-workers coming in from Manhattan and Brooklyn chose Durham while the suburbanites fled to Cary.

This has never surprised me as a concept; after all, a person more familiar and comfortable with life in the big city would more likely prefer the environs of Brightleaf Square and Ninth Street to, say, Triangle Town Center or the US 70 strip out in Clayton. (Or at least that's the calculus my wife and I made when leaving Harvard Square for North Duke Street a few years back.) But I've never had any data to back up what's been just a strong supposition.

Well, I wonder no more, thanks to an interesting little web site:

(Note: Click the image to open a larger version in a new window.)

This graph shows relative in-migration patterns from other US counties to Durham County relative to Wake County between 2000 and 2005, looking at a large number of non-N.C. counties that saw some of the greatest exoduses to Wake & Durham Counties over the five year period. The percentage shown represents the overweighting or underweighting of migration to Durham versus Wake. This measures trends in whether newcomers from different parts of the US find Durham more or less attractive than Raleigh. (For example, look at Orange County Fla. above. Of the 933 Orlandoans moving from that county to either Wake or Durham in the 2000-2005 period, 14.4% moved to Durham instead of the 23.8% that would be predicted strictly by relative county populations, presenting the underweighting factor of 60% seen above. Got it? Good!)

In this graph, the counties in red saw Wake outdraw Durham as these new residents' home in numbers disproportionate to the difference in sizes of the counties. The green counties may have seen Wake draw more of these transplants than Durham in nominal numbers (Wake is more than three times Durham's size), but Durham still drew more than its proportionate share of these new residents, suggesting transplants from these areas tended to find Durham more attractive as a new home.

What's fascinating about these data is that they fairly confirm the urban vs. suburban differentiation that I, and I think many others, have tended to hold about our two counties. We may be one Triangle -- but we appeal to different backgrounds and expectations of life in vastly different ways. Some highlights:

• New York City: Manhattan and Brooklyn all fall squarely in the Durham column, as does Essex County, NJ (home to The Oranges and Newark along with more suburban communities). On the other hand, suburban destinations like Westchester NY, Fairfield CT, and Middlesex NJ fell to Wake. Queens split down the middle, more or less.
• Boston: Durham did well with the Hub of the Universe, disproportionately drawing transplants from Suffolk and Middlesex counties, which include the core of Boston and left-leaning communities like Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, and Lexington. We didn't do as well with Worcester County, the more suburbanized 'burb in the state's midsection. Wake County drew 348 residents from "Woostah" -- Durham just 17.
• Central Florida: Ahh, the I-4 corridor, home to Karl Rove's political barnstorming to capture votes from all the subdivision cavedwellers lurking between Orlando ("The City Homicidal") and Tampa ("Dismay by the Bay"). No shock here: Central Florida half-backs leaned heavily to Wake County. As an escapee of the soulless Orlando metro area, I say to Wake Forest and Holly Springs, you can have 'em. Miami, meanwhile, is solidly Durham.
• Atlanta: This is one of my favorites. The counties generally considered "core" to Atlanta, DeKalb and Fulton -- racially and socioeconomically diverse and denser communities -- fall fairly squarely on the Durham side of the house. Gwinnett and Cobb Counties, on the other hand, are pretty clearly Wake strongholds. Ahh, Cobb County, one of the conservative backwaters of Atlanta, whose school board most recently waged a four-year fight at taxpayer expense to keep "evolution is just one theory" warning stickers on evolution textbooks. Once again, Cobb County residents: When you take I-85 to the Triangle and reach Durham, please keep on driving, guys! Have you thought of Fuquay-Varina?

All in all, Durham does quite well with America's cities -- residents of Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Houston seem to feel more at home in Durham than Raleigh. On the other hand, upstate New Yorkers and the conservative Tidewater region of Virginia head home to Wake County. (In case you're wondering, Johnston County's big out-of-state draw was Long Island, NY. No surprise there.)

I'd take these numbers and this kind of migration pattern any day of the week.

Comments

[allenk]

I am one of those former Metro Atlantans who are recent transplants to Durham. Only 1 out of 7 people who say they're from "Atlanta" are actually from the city. I've dubbed Metro Atlanta "Suburbanland."

[Phil]

Wow, that's fascinating.

I know I don't read enough of the local press, but I've got to say that this blog is one of the first pieces (in any venue) that I've seen that integrates real data and real analysis to the stuff we "feel" but often can't explain or verify.

Many thanks.

[lisa b]

My husband and and I moved here from Chicago 7 years ago, and we picked Durham on the advice of our real estate agent (who lives in Durham but works out of a Raleigh office). We told her what we were looking for (basically a neighborhood a little bit like what we had in Chicago), and she said that without a doubt Durham was what we wanted. She was correct.

I still sorely miss the CTA, however. I wish they would build us a train system ...

[Elizabeth T.]

Did the data indicate that these new Wake County residents were choosing Apex and Cary over downtown Raleigh? It would be really interesting to see the patterns of migration within Wake County--and within Durham County, for that matter.

[Barry]

"In case you're wondering, Johnston County's big out-of-state draw was Long Island, NY. No surprise there."

i'm surprised.

as a former Long Islander, re-creating my LI experience in warmer climes was definitely not on my list of reasons to move to NC. I know a pretty fair number of LI folks in Durham, too.

Unless those Johnston County transplants just wanted a shorter drive to the beach?

[KeepDurhamDifferent!]

Hey, thanks for the nod! I also used to live in Harvard Square (Craigie Circle -- I used to look at the same mudpuddle around which Vladimir Nabokov based his novel "Bend Sinister").

I know it's fashionable around these parts to bash the rich, but I hope that Durham continues to win the war for the creative class relative to downtown Raleigh. My hunch is that given the desolation of the "new" Fayetteville St., the RBC Tower condos and the like will attract the parents of artists rather than the artists themselves. Which is not to say that the CCB tower condos will be cheap, but rather more authentic.

I know a few buyers of the warehouse condos in raleigh, and while this is anecdotal they were relocating from Morristown NJ and Naples FL respectively. 'Nuff said.

[Bull City Rising]

Thanks, all, for the comments. Unfortunately, these data aren't any more specific than this in re what areas within the counties folks are moving to. I too would be curious what the destinations are, though I tend to assume most folks are heading to the Apex/Cary area.

Barry -- it's funny, I see a lot of LI'ers posting over at City-Data, and the common refrain for most of them is a feeling of being caught in the 'rat race' in LI, unable to afford as nice a house as they want, having to have a two-income household, etc. Clayton seems to be the promised land for them -- safely suburban, full of new subdivisions with cheap housing, lots of chain restaurants. I would agree that LI'ers who want a more urban/urbane locale are likely to head to Durham... but a lot of the folks on LI are there precisely because they don't want to be in the five boroughs.

Phil and all: glad this has been of interest. I enjoy getting to crunch numbers every now and then. :)

David: Small world. We used to live about two blocks over west of you, at the corner of Linnaean and Garden... in that ugly 1970s post-modern dorm. Much as the neighbors hated it, though, we loved having the QRAC gym right there.

[Barry]

i guess those are the people i left LI to get away from. The utter lack of a sense of community was something i couldn't quite put into words when i left, but as soon as i found it, i knew what i'd been missing. I can't imagine moving to NC to recreate the LI experience, only cheaper and with milder winters. But then, what do i know?

i think a lot of folks are on LI because they've been born there. in my experience, it was exceedingly rare for someone to move into the neighborhood from anywhere other than another part of the island, or from Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx. And the primary motivating factor for those folks, rather than a desire to leave the city, was more to have place to call their own. As expensive as it is on Long Island (for example, my sister has a decent public employee job, earning a reasonable salary, in a job she's held for 20 years. She's no closer to buying a house now than she was 15 years ago) it's treble or more in the city. I don't know how anybody buys an apartment in the city anymore.

reasons not to live on Long Island:

1) possibly most segregated area in the US
2) everything is an hour away, except for the things which are three hours away.
3) schools - 120+ individual school systems, funded by the most byzantine (and exorbitant) property tax system in the US.
4) home prices (although, to be fair, when i left Suffolk County, home prices were merely above average, not unfathomable)
5) culture, or lack of. it's a 90 mile long bedroom community. there are the remnants of a few small towns along the north and south shores that have managed to hold on to some identity, but everything between Sunrise Highway and Jericho Turnpike is a void.
6) politics. Suffolk County gave Nixon his second largest plurality in the 72 election (after Orange County, CA). Alphonse D'Amato used to run the Nassau County Republican machine. 'nuff said.

Reasons to go back to LI for a visit:

1) North Fork wine country
2) Memory Motel in Montauk
3) Walt Whitman's House (but not the nearby mall named for him)
4) WUSB-FM, Stony Brook
5) a handful of friends and relatives who never managed to move away.

[Blazer Manpurse, BFA]

Bashing the rich is so WTO protest-era.

We eat them now.

[Bull City Rising]

A mea culpa to all. Remember how on the original post I mentioned that I only had data of counties sending more than 100 people to Durham or Wake? That's because the web site with the GIS/IRS data mashup was down this weekend, so I was using statistics from a thread over at City-Data: http://www.city-data.com/forum/raleigh-durham-chapel-hill-cary/87328-county-county-migration-patterns-2000-2005-a.html.

Looking at the GIS/IRS data today with the web site back up and running... I discovered that some of the counties that were originally listed as less than 100 transplants to Wake (e.g., New York NY, Cook IL, San Diego, among several others) actually *did* have more than 100, meaning about seven of the individual counties on the original post flipped places.

The conclusions of the original post still hold, with Durham drawing from urban areas and Wake from suburban ones. In terms of actual data flips, though, Fairfax VA, Santa Clara CA, and Queens NY all flipped to Wake's favor but were still close to even -- which actually isn't surprising given that these are all suburban area but ones that are fairly dense and close to their cities' core.

On the other hand, San Diego CA flipped solidly Wake with the updated data -- which again ain't much of a surprise.

I've made edits in the post to reflect this. Sorry, gang, for the error.