San Francisco, for better or for worse, is a city of transplants, transients and more than a few people who will head back east after a couple years living in the Marina bubble. But where did they come from in the first place? Recently, Spokeo analyzed some cell phone data to track down the home states of the city's recently-arrived set.
Nevada — particularly Las Vegas — seems to be the most popular emigration point for San Francisco's newest residents, with Hawaii and Colorado (where CU Boulder alums are shipped West immediately upon graduation) not far behind. Rounding out the biggest contributors to the transplant scene are a mix of usual suspects like Massachusetts and Washington State. The rest of the city's transplants come from a mix of neighboring states (Oregon, Arizona) and East Coast expats (New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey).
Unfortunately, the data doesn't break out Southern California as it's own state, but diving down a little bit, we find some even more interesting data in the most popular cities of origin. Next time you need someone to blame for your rising rent, you can pin it on the cold in Chicago, the rain in Seattle or the flight of the cool kids from Manhattan and Brooklyn:
Interestingly enough, San Franciscans are the #2 group fleeing to New York, as well. Meanwhile, in Oakland, that city's biggest sources of transplants are remarkably similar to San Francisco's. In fact, San Francisco doesn't even register on Oakland's list of Top 20 cities.
As for Spokeo's methodology here, the company says their migration study is based on people's cell phone numbers, which folks don't tend to change when they move anymore, but you can take that with a grain of salt the size of a new iPhone data plan. The graphic itself is "a visual representation of the most common out-of-state mobile numbers found in a your selected city. All numbers are standardized to account for population. By identifying the origin of a mobile number and matching it to address records, Spokeo has pinpointed migration and settlement trends throughout the United States. The different colors represent the home states of transplants."
