Where New Residents of Detroit Are Moving From

Al Harris
September 21, 2016
Find Self-Storage

Detroit is a city on the mend. After years of decay, the city is rebounding thanks to a rising wave of creatives and entrepreneurs that are seizing the opportunity to establish roots in “The D”.

Many of those revitalizing the city have longstanding connections to the area, but many are also moving here from around the country looking to make their mark. But where are they coming from?

Overall growth in Detroit is flat. The metro added just over a net of 500 new residents between 2014 and 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The current population stands at about 4.3 million.

It would appear that migration out of Detroit cancels out migration into Detroit. Still, we were curious to see where new the new urban pioneers making their way to Motor City are coming from.

To find out, we looked further back at some other Census data from 2009-2013 that shows county to county migration patterns across the United States.

Moving to Detroit

Looking at inbound migration to Wayne County, where Detroit is located, we found that 48,471 people moved there during a five year period. The majority of arrivals came from somewhere else in Michigan–more than 65 percent. Most in state movers came from Oakland County, Macomb County and Washtenaw County.

Of the other 34.6 percent of people that came to Wayne County from out-of-state, these are the top 10 counties of origin:

  1. Cook County, IL (Chicago)
  2. Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix)
  3. Lucas County, OH (Toledo)
  4. Anchorage County, AK
  5. Fulton County, GA (Atlanta)
  6. Hillsborough County, FL (Tampa)
  7. Clark County, NV (Las Vegas)
  8. Citrus County, FL
  9. Bronx County, NY (New York City)
  10. King County, WA (Seattle)

More than 16,790 people moved to Wayne County from out-of-state from 2009 to 2013.

Current Trends

All that movement generates demand for local self-storage facilities.

SpareFoot looked at our own data to see where people are moving to Detroit from currently.

To compile our list, we looked at the number of Sparefoot.com searchers for storage in the Detroit metro area from April 2015 through April 2016. We also found the top ten places those searches originated from.

Based on our analysis, Lansing is the top market where people are moving from. The area generated 17.7 of searches for storage among the top ten places.

Below are the top ten metro areas where people are searching for storage in Detroit, along with the percent share of searchers among the top 10:

Lansing-East Lansing MI 17.7%
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island 15.8%
Washington-Baltimore DC-MD-VA-WV 14.9%
Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland MI 9.7%
Chicago-Gary-Kenosha IL-IN-WI 9.5%
Columbus OH 8.3%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton WA 7.8%
Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County CA 7.3%
San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CA 4.7%
Atlanta GA 4.3%

We believe that storage searches made from one city for storage space in another city likely indicates intent to relocate to that city.

As you can see there is some overlap with what the census data shows, with the notable additions of likely movers from Washington D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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