Maps Offer Neighborhood-Level Insight Into American Migration

California’s most devastating wildfire – the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 and destroyed nearly 19,000 structures – forced nearly half of all residents living within designated fire perimeters to relocate within a year.

That local exodus is documented by Cornell-led research that mapped annual moves between U.S. neighborhoods from 2010 to 2019 in detail 4,600 times greater than standard public data. Called MIGRATE, the new, publicly available dataset revealed that most of those displaced remained within the affected county – moves not captured in county-level public migration data aggregated every five years.

The case study illustrates how a finer-grained understanding of migration could help researchers and policymakers investigate a range of issues at the national and local levels, from natural disasters to school funding, affordable housing and economic segregation. About 44 million people move every year in the U.S., but most of those moves are invisible in official data.

“MIGRATE reveals trends that shape daily life that broader data completely miss: rising moves into top-income neighborhoods, racial gaps in upward mobility and local shocks like post-wildfire outmigration,” said Maria Fitzpatrick, professor in the Department of Economics and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. “For communities, journalists, researchers and planners, it’s a trustworthy, neighborhood-level lens on climate risk, housing pressure and opportunity – available for nonprofit research use.”

MIGRATE’s co-authors include Nikhil Garg, assistant professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and Cornell Engineering, and Gabriel Agostini, a doctoral student at Cornell Tech.