The frog is always greener on the other side of its belly

As a less-than-optimistic person I spend a disproportionate amount of time day dreaming what it would be like to live in another area of the country.  I often am tempted to attribute the majority of my failures on things out of my control.

"If I only lived in X city I would be able to make more money, have more opportunities, meet more girls because there is 5 million more people in this city" or "the GDP per capita is $19,000 more in Y county, there is more money in circulation there".

I realize this is faulty logic because while the mean income may be higher in one part of the country there is almost always extremely high personal financial variance and just moving someplace will not make me a wealthy person or significantly contribute to me becoming wealthy.

Here are the current 13th largest United States Metro Areas I have been focused on:



Source: US Census

As you can see over the last 20 years the populations of 12/13 of these cities has been absolutely growing.  Detroit is the only area that lost people and it lost 156,307 people from 2000 to 2010.  The deltas in red are the cities that have slowed grow rates. The cities in yellow have virtually the same grow rate as the previous ten years and the minority of cities in the green have a substantially increased grow rate.  Houston, Washington D.C. and Riverside are accelerating in population growth speed.  Almost every city is increasing its population velocity except Detroit.

The following data is only growth over one year but is more recent.

Taking this data and extrapolating into the next 65 years we get a forecast of each metro area's population:

In a nutshell, Dallas (deep purple) will over take New York city before the end of the century as the most populous city in the United States with Houston right behind it.  Chicago (deep green) and Philadelphia (dark orange) did not fair so well.  Detroit (light blue) is the lone lost child almost falling off the line graph.

This forecast makes gigantic assumptions based on what little data is available and should not be taken as concrete scientific analysis.  For all I know global warming could significantly stagnate migration to the southern and warmer states or the African American birth rate differential could become so disproportional to other races that Philadelphia and Chicago become the next Detroit.

My day dreams are now set in Dallas, Texas based in this data.  I am glad because Los Angelos has earth quakes and the worst air pollution outside of big city China.

Tools used: Microsoft Excel, Paint
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