For Springfield residents, the grass is greener in Kansas City
Growing up in Nixa in the early 1990s, it seemed that half of the people I went to high school with were transplants from California. The late ’80s housing boom made the move attractive for anyone willing to swap cramped but costly West Coast real estate for more expansive digs and a slower pace of life in the Ozarks.
I don’t have numbers to back up those teenage observations. But some new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the folks migrating to Christian County these days are far more likely to hail from Laclede County than Long Beach.
Greene County, meanwhile, is a magnet for migrants from all over southwest Missouri. More people move here from St. Louis than the other way around, although we’re losing residents, overall, to the area around Kansas City.
The information, which tallies migration between counties and metro areas from 2009-2013, was released a few weeks ago on the Census Bureau’s website. I found it after a social media post by a former colleague, Mike Brothers, piqued my curiosity on a morning I was supposed to be working on another project.
Brothers, who posted a story about Chicago losing residents to St. Louis, wondered what the trend was between Springfield and Kansas City. After digging into the Census website, I was able to download a spreadsheet that — after some cursing and number-crunching — offered up information about specific metro areas, although I had to do any inbound-outbound comparisons myself.
Better yet, I stumbled across a handy interactive map, which you can find online at http://flowsmapper.geo.census.gov/map.html, showing county-to-county movement.
Using that, I was able to quickly determine that over the five-year period, about 746 Greene County residents moved to Kansas City’s Jackson County, while only 324 migrated in the other direction.
(Jackson County, meanwhile, lost more residents than it gained from several counties on the Kansas side of the border. Assuming those were Jayhawks fans, they’re unlikely to be missed).
Playing around with the map turned up a couple of other interesting facts. In addition to Kansas City, Oklahoma City and the Portland, Oregon metro area are two other areas siphoning residents from Greene County.
On the plus side, we’re gaining residents, overall, from counties around St. Louis, Nashville and Tulsa. And contrary to popular wisdom about urban sprawl, more people moved into Greene County from Christian County during the studied period than the other way around.
More than a curiosity, the information about residential migration could be useful for folks in city government and at the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce who are working to attract and retain talented employees to the Springfield area.
Jeff Byrd, chair of the chamber’s young professional group, The Network, said he sees potential for putting the census information to use.
“Part of the mission is fighting that ‘brain drain,’” he said.
Byrd, who worked as a planner in Christian County before his current job, for Sho-Me Technologies, said he wasn’t aware that the Census Bureau tracked migration in so much detail, or made it available in a user-friendly way.
“I played around with it a little bit ... It looks like that would be a tool that might offer some good statistics,” he said.
Working in the telecommunications industry, he wasn’t surprised to see that Kansas City was a draw for local residents.
“I see what’s happening in Kansas City with Google,” he said, referring to the company’s installation of high-speed Internet service in the Kansas City metro. “There’s a lot of start-ups out there, a lot of technology companies really energized about what’s happening ... I could see why a lot of our graduates are moving up there.”
By studying what Kansas City is doing, Springfield could build on the success it already is having drawing residents from St. Louis and elsewhere, he said.
“I think Springfield is creating a little bit of that, already, with the eFactory and things like that,” Byrd. “I think there’s a lot to be learned with what KC’s doing.”
Top metro areas people lived in before moving to Springfield
1) St. Louis
2) Kansas City
3) Joplin
4) Asia (the continent)
5) Fayetteville, Arkansas
6) Jefferson City
7) Europe (yes, another continent)
Top metro areas people move to after leaving Springfield
1) Kansas City
2) St. Louis
3) Joplin
4) Jefferson City
5) Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
6) Portland, Oregon
7) Columbia
Source: U.S. Census Bureau American Community Surveys, 2009-2013
Crews use machinery to sift through burned remains of north Springfield home