Unlike New York and San Francisco–or even Denver–Chicago’s workforce draw is mostly regional.[/caption]Jim Russell pointed me to the workforce report program that LinkedIn runs. They use their data to show trends in 20 major job markets.For each market they track, they put together a map of the 10 cities that market gains the most workers from and the ten it loses the most workers to.These are interesting maps in their own right. They also highlight the extremely parochial nature of the talent flows into Midwestern cities. It’s pretty stark, actually. Here’s a set of comparisons, looking strictly at inflows. There are also outflow and gross migration charts and more information that’s interesting too, but I’ll leave you to dig into that yourself.
Let’s take a look at these three roughly peer cities. First, the top ten cities for Minneapolis.
Despite the Twin Cities enjoying a high reputation within the Midwest region, their draw remains highly regional. Their top draws are from adjacent states plus Chicago.By contrast, here’s Denver.
And here’s Seattle:
The difference is stark.
Living up to its reputation as the capital of the Midwest, Chicago’s draw is from a tightly-focused region.
Now, here’s New York:
Five of New York’s top ten draws are actually from outside the country. That’s pretty amazing.And here’s San Francisco.
You see the flows are mostly from other major tech hubs and big cities.Again, a pretty start difference.
We see the same thing in smaller tier cities. Here’s Cleveland.
And here’s Nashville.
Again, I’d encourage you to spend some time over at LinkedIn. You can tell a lot about these cities and their economies just by their migration maps. You can also instantly see another dimension of the challenge facing Midwestern cities.[This article was originally published by The Urbanophile.]
Aaron Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor for City Journal. His blog is Urbanophile.com.
