The Buffalo Bills were scheduled to host the New York Jets today in a game between division rivals. Instead the Bills will play the Jets in Detroit on Monday night as the city is still digging itself out from two snow storms that dropped five feet of snow over western New York. Most people would not usually associate an NFL game being postponed and moved with Human Geography, but as always everything comes back to Human Geography.
When my students break down population patterns around the country one of the cities that comes up every year is Naples, Florida. The population in that city is disproportionately made up of elderly people, as Naples is one of the prime retirement destinations in the country. If you are wondering what the population pattern of Naples has to do with a record breaking snowstorm in upstate New York I assure you that the connection is real.
I ask my students to imagine themselves in the following scenario: they are a retired 70 year old factory worker living in the Northeast. Where would they rather be in the dead of winter, scraping ice off their windshield and shoveling snow in Buffalo or playing nine holes of golf in Naples where it’s 78 degrees. The answer is always overwhelmingly Naples.
The environmental pull factors that draw people out of the cold weather and to warm destinations are obvious. They have contributed heavily to the recent trend of the population shifting southward. This migration shift is only expected to grow as the American population gets older and more people enter retirement. Buffalo is one of many cities in the “Rust Belt” that is currently losing population and the recent extreme weather will likely convince many more to head south because the NFL has yet to postpone a game due to extreme sunshine.