Reordering of Cities

Jacksonville is now the nation’s 11th-most populated city, having overtaken San Jose in 2022. This is partly because Jacksonville grew by 1.5 percent since 2021, but also because San Jose lost 1.0 percent of its residents, according to Census Bureau estimates released earlier this week.

The new number eleven. Photo by Jon Zander.

Charlotte also overtook Indianapolis as the nation’s 15th largest city, partly because Indianapolis lost 0.2 percent of its residents but mainly because Charlotte grew by 1.7 percent. Las Vegas grew by 0.8 percent, overtaking Boston as the 24th largest city as the latter shrank by 0.6 percent.

A comparison of the latest numbers with 2010 census data shows that some cities are just losers, having lost both from 2010 to 2020 and from 2020 to 2022. Some of these are Rust Belt cities–Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Toledo–that have been losing since after World War II. Some are losing even though they are closer to the Sun Belt, including Louisville, Memphis, and Norfolk. Then there is Santa Ana, California, which is probably losing just because its housing prices are so high.

In most of these cases, the suburbs are growing even as the cities are losing residents. In 1950, St. Louis had 857,000 residents, more than 60 percent of the 1.4 million in its urban area. By 2020, it had just 300,000 residents, only 15 percent of the 2.2 million in the urban area. As of 2022, St. Louis’ population had fallen to 287,000, having lost almost as many between 2020 and 2022 as it lost between 2010 and 2020.

What’s going on is that people in these cities are leaving dense apartments behind for single-family homes in the suburbs. In 1950, St. Louis residents were packed in at more than 14,000 people per square mile, which is roughly the same as San Francisco in 2020. By 2020, St. Louis’ density had fallen to less than 4,900 per square mile while its suburbs had just 2,200 people per square mile. The region’s population had grown by 50 percent but had thinned out.

What’s really news is all of the cities that were supposed to be heralding the triumph of the city but now are shrinking. New York City lost 1.5 percent of its residents, or 5.3 percent since 2020. Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Jose, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Oakland, Omaha, and Virginia Beach also lost population in both 2021 and 2022. While I don’t know why Indianapolis, Omaha, and Virginia Beach are on this list, the others are high-density cities that people would leave to avoid contagious diseases and (except for Philadelphia) high housing prices.

The winners–cities that grew from 2010 to 2020 as well as in both 2021 and 2022–include Phoenix, which overtook Philadelphia as the nation’s fifth-largest city in 2021, San Antonio, Austin, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Charlotte, and Oklahoma City. What most of these have in common is that they are low-density cities in low-density urban areas. Houston and Dallas both lost in 2021, possibly because their densities are a little higher. Houston recovered in 2022 but Dallas did not.

In many cases, the pandemic is clearly at work. The decennial census counts populations as of April 1; the annual estimates are as of July 1. So the Census Bureau has an estimate of what happened to city populations at the height of COVID, between April and July 2020.

New York City lost 0.7 percent of its residents between April and July, and lost another 4.6 percent over the next two years. Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston also lost both between April and July and between 2020 and 2022. Washington DC lost 2.7 percent between April and July, but gained all of 0.1 percent back by 2022.

Despite clear evidence that people don’t want to live in dense housing any more, cities and transit agencies are still thrilled to give developers tens of millions of dollars to subsidize high-density mixed-use developments. If people really wanted to live in them, they wouldn’t need the subsidies, but even with the subsidies many of these are going to lose money because the developers didn’t expect a pandemic to drive people away.