Background

Problem Statement: How will policy makers and government officals know what to make in 10 years?

Understanding the fluidity of population size is key to establishing proper infrastructure to maintain a healthy and happy community. Our goal is to info Government officials and policymakers about population patterns in their juristiction so they can make infrastructure decisions to meet the needs of their people. The purpose would be to illustrate the source of the population growth or shrinking and help them be informed and prepared for building infrastructure, housing, etc.

Building the correct infrastructure to support the population is a challenging task. With too little, the community struggles to thrive while having too much is a waste of time and resources. One example of this is the empty city in China, Kangbashi in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Kangbashi was built to hold a million people, yet only 30,000 live there and the properties are beginning to lose value. Compared to areas with failing infrastructure, such as the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati that is failing and does not meet the needs of the community’s transportation needs. In both cases, it is pertinent that people have the services they need to build a community with transportation, jobs, and housing for the community to grow. Any shortcomings result in bottlenecks and stunted economic development.

This is a difficult task to plan for but working on understanding the size of the population and demographics can help us plan years in advance to try to meet future needs. An insight that a user would have is that in this region, say Nevada, the population has been increasing at a rate of 10% where most of the migrants are from California. Over the last five years, this percentage has grown and looks to continue growing as the cost of living continues to increase. Therefore it is impertinent to the success of Nevada that there are enough houses and jobs to continue this influx from California.

The visualization would offer an overview of the migration that occurs throughout the United States by coloring each individual state to represent whether the inbound or outbound migration was larger. Zooming in, there would be a heatmap county level analysis that displays the net migration of each county as the next granular level. The data comes from the US Census Bureau Geographic Mobility from 2015 to 2020. This data contains estimates for total population sizes for each year by state and where they resided a year ago.