Where Do New Jersey’s Out-Migrants Go?

October 25th, 2018 by Tim Evans

What are the most common destinations, at the county level, for people who move out of New Jersey? Part 1 of a series investigating where New Jersey’s out-migrating residents, in particular its Millennials, are going.

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The question of whether or not New Jersey is losing Millennials to other states (answer: It is) raises other questions, including whether the out-migration of young people is any different from the long-standing general domestic out-migration from New Jersey (and indeed from most of the Northeast) to other, usually warmer, parts of the country. Where do people – of any age – go when they move out of New Jersey?

To establish a baseline for the top destinations for all New Jersey out-migrants irrespective of age, the table below contains a list of the top 30 counties that received the largest numbers of out-migrants from New Jersey between 2009 and 2015.*

 

Destination County	Destination State	Major City in County	Total NJ Out-migrants to County 2009 thru 2015
New York County	New York	Manhattan Borough	81,813
Philadelphia County	Pennsylvania	coextensive w/city of Philadelphia	57,269
Bucks County	Pennsylvania	NE Philadelphia suburbs	30,799
Queens County	New York	Queens Borough	28,171
Northampton County	Pennsylvania	Bethlehem/Easton	28,139
Kings County	New York	Brooklyn Borough	27,171
New Castle County	Delaware	Wilmington	24,744
Palm Beach County	Florida	West Palm Beach/Boca Raton	21,072
Broward County	Florida	Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood	18,277
Miami-Dade County	Florida	Miami	17,271
Bronx County	New York	Bronx Borough	16,713
Los Angeles County	California	Los Angeles	16,351
Orange County	Florida	Orlando	16,110
Montgomery County	Pennsylvania	N/NW Philadelphia suburbs	15,380
Maricopa County	Arizona	Phoenix	15,161
Delaware County	Pennsylvania	W/SW Philadelphia suburbs	14,992
Chester County	Pennsylvania	W Philadelphia suburbs	14,179
Mecklenburg County	North Carolina	Charlotte	14,048
Suffolk County	Massachusetts	Boston	13,428
Lehigh County	Pennsylvania	Allentown	13,361
Harris County	Texas	Houston	13,036
Middlesex County	Massachusetts	Lowell/N and W Boston suburbs	12,990
Wake County	North Carolina	Raleigh	12,956
Hillsborough County	Florida	Tampa	11,586
Fairfield County	Connecticut	Bridgeport/Stamford/Danbury	11,051
Westchester County	New York	Yonkers/N suburban NYC	10,750
Cook County	Illinois	Chicago	10,613
District of Columbia	District of Columbia	Washington	10,477
Centre County	Pennsylvania	State College	10,081
Lee County	Florida	Cape Coral/Fort Myers	10,049

 

There is nothing terribly surprising on the list. The two big cities that are immediately adjacent to New Jersey (Philadelphia and four of the five boroughs of New York) dominate the top of the list, along with many of their non-New Jersey suburban counties. Several other large, urbanized counties whose labor markets overlap with New Jersey’s appear as well: Lehigh and Northampton counties in Pennsylvania; New Castle County, Delaware; and Fairfield County, Connecticut. There are six counties of central and southern Florida that illustrate Florida’s reputation as a retirement destination for people who are tired of Northeastern winters. Centre County, Pennsylvania, most likely makes the list because it’s the home of Penn State, attracting a fair number of recent high school graduates from neighboring New Jersey (remember, these data include out-migrants of all ages, including kids going off to college). Rounding out the list are the central counties of a few of the country’s largest metro areas (Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Washington, Boston, Phoenix) and a pair of second-tier Sunbelt metros (Charlotte, Raleigh).

By and large, people leaving New Jersey tend to either stay nearby (possibly in search of cheaper housing, in the case of moves to Pennsylvania or Delaware), move to a very large metro area elsewhere in the country (often with better weather), or retire to Florida.

In the next installment, we will examine migration outflows broken out by age range, to investigate where Millennial out-migrants in particular are going, and whether their destinations follow the same patterns visible in the overall data or if they tend to be attracted to different types of places than older generations.

Part 2: Where do New Jersey’s Out-migrating Millennials go?

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*County-to-county migration flows are available every year from the five-year version of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, starting in 2009. We retrieved data on out-migrants from every New Jersey county for every year from 2009 through 2015 and summed them by destination county to produce a list of the most popular destinations. Note that in this analysis we are only looking at out-migrants, not in-migrants; we are considering the destinations of people who leave New Jersey, but not the origins of those who move in. So the flows we are discussing are gross outflows, not net.

Posted in Demographics and Trends, Planning and Governance

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One Response to “Where Do New Jersey’s Out-Migrants Go?”

1. Joseph says:

   October 26, 2018 at 12:21 pm

   Lots of people moving to places with better cities than we’ve got. It would’ve been nice if NJ hadn’t spent half a century sabotaging its cities, but since we can only move forward, I really hope to see our leaders take New Jersey Future’s advice and build back up our great urban places!