King County Residential Migration Viewer
Residential displacement occurs when a household experiences the involuntary loss of home, community, and/or place. Or, in other words, when a household moves when they rather would not. Things like being priced out, eviction, foreclosure, and the departure of neighbors, businesses, and organizations are all examples of the various economic, cultural, and legal factors that can cause displacement.
Telling the story of displacement and understanding why people move is a complex, difficult, and essential task. No one data source can fully capture the entire problem, but there are a few that can provide some information on local patterns. From an analysis of healthcare related administrative records, the data visualization below shows how patterns of residential movement (moving from one place to another) change over time, location, and by type of insurance coverage. By examining flows of movement between one neighborhood (defined as a ZIP code) and another, we can identify how neighborhoods are related to each other.
For example, we can answer questions like:
About how many people moved from Place A to Place B?
Of people moving into Place B in a given year, where did they come from?
Of people moving out of Place A, where did they go?
How do the movement patterns of people with Medicaid for insurance (usually folks with fewer financial resources) compare to those with commercial insurance (usually folks with more financial resources)?
Although these data do not reveal why people move, they do provide information on what moves are occurring and which ones might be evidence of displacement.
The Residential Migration Viewer Tool was created by researchers within Public Health - Seattle-King County (PHSKC) after discussions with the Communities of Opportunity Evaluation Advisory Group on the need for better data tools to help inform our understanding of gentrification and displacement in King County.
Questions on the viewer tool or the underlying data can be directed to Epidemiologist, Daniel Casey at info@coopartnerships.org