No, The Gentrifiers Really Aren’t Coming From Ohio

Yeah, we know, we know. (Image via WeHeartIt)
I’ve been saying for a long time that all the “GO BACK TO OHIO!!!” venom aimed at faceless gentrifiers is a crock. The real enemies are the hedge fund types or parent-bankrolled transplants from nearby wealthy suburbs, the kind of people who think condos are a perfectly nice place to live and have made the Levee a crowded shell of its former self, not gentle mid-western transplants taking a crack at the big city. Well, now data backs me up!
Via Curbed, a site called Spokeo crunched the numbers using cell phone data (most people don’t get a new phone with the area code of their new city when they move, you see), and lo and behold, of the top 20 cities sourcing New York’s transplants, not a one of them is in Ohio. Other than Chicago, none of them are even in the midwest at all! See below:
This data mostly confirms what we already knew; people from Jersey like to move to the big cities, coastal cities are constantly swapping residents back and forth, and people from Florida do everything in their power to get the hell out. Mostly, though, we can finally put this Ohio trope to bed, and focus our ire where it belongs: on people from Jersey, or even worse, from D.C. If we’re going to have shout-y gentrification debates, may as well get them right.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.