Wednesday February 11, 2015
On the first day of the year, Atlas Van Lines released the results of their annual Moving Migrations Study. The data comes from the number of interstate moves handled by Atlas agents in the previous year. Each U.S. state and Canadian province is classified as inbound, outbound or balanced.
In 2014, Atlas moved 2,034 households in or out of the Pelican State. 926 were inbound moves and 1,108 were headed out of the state. With the number of households moving into Louisiana roughly equal to those moving out (neither exceeding 55% of the state’s total moves handled by Atlas), Louisiana remained a balanced state for the third year in a row.
Louisiana has been a balanced state for the last 7 out of 10 years. The only other status Louisiana achieved in this particular timeframe was outbound in 2005, 2006 and 2011. The increase in outbound moves in 2005 and 2006 are possibly related to the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
Just over half U.S. states were balanced in 2014, Louisiana being just 1 of 26 balanced states (no Canadian provinces were balanced for 2014). Many of the southern states were classified as balanced with the exception of Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas and Florida who were inbound. No southern states were outbound for 2014. Out of the southern states, the status shifts from 2013 to 2014 were in Florida and Mississippi going from balanced to inbound, and in West Virginia which went from balanced to outbound.
The full map of moving migration data can be found here.