Trego's Mountain Ear

Time was when I had to use U-Haul rental rates to get a handle on migration between states.  I could combine that with Census data to get a fairly clear picture of what type of people leave California to come to Montana – just an example, you understand.

The net continues to grow as an information source – some good info, some questionable, some downright bad.  https://votewithyourfeet.net/map/?map=migration seems to be a good link, showing the number of people leaving one state for another, and what their income level is.  Someone other than me has already done the work to provide the data.

Looking at the map, I see that over 25,000 Californians moved to Montana in the ten years between 2012 and 2022 – and that they brought with them $2,199,819,000 in yearly income.  If I drop off the last three zeroes from each number (so my old calculator can handle it), it looks like the California immigrants brought an average of $90,000 per year income with them.  This may go a little way in explaining the increasing land values the tax assessors keep showing.

When we moved home, back in 2015, Renata and I were part of the 450 people moving from South Dakota to Montana.  Come to think of it, Sam’s move to teach in Geraldine made us 3 out of the net 450 people in the ten year migration – it’s a small number when a family of three can be almost a full percent of the ten-year migration.