MapLab: How to Track American Migration
We go behind the scenes of our most recent data project.
Screenshot of an interactive map showing how metro areas lost and gained during the pandemic.
Source: USPS, U.S. Census Bureau
This is Marie Patino, filling in for Laura. Today we're going behind the scenes of our most recent data project: Tracking American migration.
We've been following the "urban exodus" beat in the U.S. since the first lockdowns started in March 2020. Articles popped up about how people were leaving cities en masse. To examine their claims, we started looking at data about how people moved during the pandemic. At first, we looked at numbers from moving companies, real estate searches and surveys. None of it was comprehensive, but together, they started to give us a pretty good preliminary picture.