Mapping the bedroom communities of the US
I've recently been playing with ways to quantify where Americans work and where they live. In particular, where are there more people than jobs, and where are there more jobs than people? One way to look at this is by taking the US Census data on the journey to and from work, and calculating the ratio of jobs in a county to workers in a county (for the east coast, where counties are small). In the figure below, red counties have a ratio above 1 (more jobs than workers), while green counties have a ratio below 1 (less jobs than workers).
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The counties that have the highest ratios are not necessarily the ones you might expect most: Tunica County, MS (3.92); Norton, VI (3.64); Williamsburg, VI (3.2). For reference, Manhattan has a ratio of 2.73. On the flip side, the communities that have the lowest ratios are mostly counties on the outskirts of sprawly cities like Atlanta: Long, GA (0.19); Echols, GA (0.21); Crawford, GA (0.25).
Another interesting question that can be asked from this data is, how many workers from a given county work overseas? The figure below expresses this as the number of workers out of a 1000 that work overseas.
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Cities tend to be higher, with places like New York City have 2.7 overseas workers. So do upscale vacation places, such as Martha's Vineyard (2.1). However, the areas with the highest proportion of overseas workers, by far, are military bases (Onslow county, where Camp Lejune is, has 19.4) and counties along the gulf coast (perhaps the oil industry?). Interestingly, much of the country has essentially no workers working overseas.
