Vancouver CMA Intraprovincial and Interprovincial Migration

Refrains I have heard, as long as I can remember, is families migrating away from expensive cities into other regions due to high housing costs. This would make sense simply from a "diffusion" perspective where areas of growing population will invoke migration to less populated areas. To capture this effect I have plotted intraprovincial (to other parts of the province) and interprovincial (to other provinces) migration by lumped population cohorts:

In terms of migration due to high housing prices, while there may be some effect, out migration in the early 2000s was heavily negative even with prices and affordability lower than today's. Other observations:

• There has been smaller intraprovincial out-migration of the 30-44 cohort since the recession. This meant that from 2009 through 2011 there would have been additional housing demand for this cohort
• The older cohorts, including those with school-age children, tend to have net migration out of Vancouver CMA.
• The fundamental mode of interprovincial migration patterns, regardless of cohort, is on the order of 15–20 years.

International migration graphs are below, with an interesting decomposition of the 15-29 year cohort: