Seems like it’s a rite of passage for young professionals and college grads from Buffalo, New York … moving to Charlotte, North Carolina.
When I got out of graduate school, just about all the Buffalo natives in my class were Charlotte bound. Seems like everybody I know back home has takes of friends and relatives that have left for Charlotte … just Charlotte. My parents tell me there was a local radio talk show where the subject one day was … why are so many Buffalonians going to Charlotte? They couldn’t find an answer, except “jobs,” but certainly Charlotte isn’t the only city that has employers with job vacancies within a day’s drive of Buffalo.
There are other rapidly growing or economically healthy metro areas that are within an eight hour drive from Buffalo … Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Washington … even Cleveland and Detroit, three and four hours away respectively, are in better shape, job-wise. However, the vast majority seem to have Charlotte as a destination.
Why do Buffalonians looking to leave have their sights aimed squarely at Charlotte, and seemingly noplace else? Are there other diasporical quirks, like … oh, a mass exodus from Rochester to Nashville? Syracuse to Jacksonville?
Well, certainly you have anecdotal evidence that perhaps clouds your judgement on where all people leaving Buffalo go to. My wife is from Buffalo and many of her friends and family have moved to the Carolinas in general - both north and south. And having said that, it is worth pointing out that my wife ended up moving here to Canada to be with me…
“New York State: North Carolina’s Maternity Hospital”?
We’ve encountered a lot of people from the Empire State since moving here. Two anecdotes:
[ul][li]Between 1999 and 2001, I worked for a company with just over 100 employees. In addition to myself, there was another staff member who had grown up (along with her husband) in a small town five miles from my childhood home, and an engineer who was the son of the mayor of another town less than 30 miles from where we’d come from.[/li][li]In 1998, when we moved to Pilot, the hamlet had a population of 110. This number included a couple from Copenhagen NY, a couple from Watertown NY, a man from Lorraine NY and his wife from Dexter NY, her three children (by a previous marriage) born in Watertown NY, the wife of one of them from Watertown NY, their three children from Watertown NY, the woman’s neice from Dexter NY, her husband from Watertown NY, their three children from Watertown NY, a young man and his daughter from Watertown NY, and a couple and their four children from Mexico NY. While some of these moved togther, there were at least three completely independent decisions by people from a small town/rural area with a 20-mile radius from upstate New York, total population less than 100,000, to settle in this small hamlet, comprising 24% of the population here at that time. (We still comprise over 6% of the hamlet population, after people having moved.)[/li][*]None of the above except Barb and me have ever greeted Opal, and none of them is possessed of a 1920’s style death ray or ever found the third word ending in -gry. Nor did they involve themselves in any other SDMB conventions – except that when purchasing groceries, at least once they came back bringing pie. [/ul]
A large fraction of my small dept. in Rochester ended up in Raleigh/RTP area. They in turn have been lately getting other ex-Rochesterians (Rochesterites?) to buy vacation properties in the state.
Figures the Buffalo(n)ians would pick Charlotte instead.
I can answer this question empirically. I’m going to run the alumni database at my Western New York university through MapPoint. See you in a few minutes…
Of the about 15,000 “clean” records we’ve got, 250 alums exactly are resident in NC. Of those 250, 76 are in the Charlotte MSA–a pretty good total. But not even close to the top MSA in the Southeast:
Empirical but unscientific conclusion: There are more ex-WNYers in Atlanta or various Florida locales, or even in Chapel Hill-Durham, than in Charlotte. And 76 out of 15,000 isn’t much of a mass exodus.
Interesting that you found a lot of Buffalonians down there, though, elmwood. Gotta be warmer.
1983 - Bethlehem Steel closes most of its Lackawanna steel making facility.
The loss of market share by Detroit during the 70s and 80s also hurt.
Historically, the Western New York economy has led the nation into recessions, declined more deeply, recovered less rapidly, and less fully than the rest of the US economy
Too bad, because it’s got the nicest people in the world, the best sports fans, and the best weather assuming you own a 4x4, lots of Goretex, and a Halloween costume that can fit over a snowmobile suit.
Despite what the OP states, the entire industrial northeast has been losing jobs and people, especially young college graduates, for decades. As Duke’s database shows the trend is to move to the south, where new jobs have been accumulating.
Nothing strange or odd about Buffalonians moving south. As for the Charlotte theory: Just an example of how people tend to extrapolate what they notice into a trend - just like you tend to notice cars of a particular color or brand more after you buy one yourself.
