Tag Archives: population

Who is driving newfound Midwestern population growth?

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I wrote in January about the modestly increasing population in the Midwest and this piece from yesterday suggests housing affordability is behind the change. Let’s say this is true and it is more than a one or two year pattern: more people are moving to the Midwest and they are doing so because they can still get good housing for less than $350,000. Who exactly are these movers? Some speculation from yesterday’s piece:

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Take Rockford, the most popular housing market from the Zillow report. Although it’s within easy driving distance of Chicago, the average home value is about $170,000, to Chicago’s $300,000. A hybrid worker could conceivably work from Chicago a day or two a week while paying much less for a house than if they lived in the city. The same goes for Milwaukee, which is also an hour and a half from Chicago…

In addition to proximity to a large city, what distinguishes bright spots such as Columbus and Indianapolis from less desirable midwestern cities is the availability of good-paying jobs. After all, few people can buy a house, even for $300,000, if they can’t find work nearby. According to OSU’s Partridge, the midwestern cities that were less reliant on manufacturing in the 1950s are the ones doing well now. These places were never dependent on factory jobs, so they were better able to weather the steep decline in U.S. manufacturing that began decades ago. “Because they had a more service-oriented composition of businesses, they did much better,” Partridge said. Today, these cities offer plentiful finance, tech, and health-care jobs. JPMorganChase employs 18,000 people in Columbus, for example; the pharmaceutical company Lilly is headquartered in Indianapolis.

Two kinds of people are referenced: people who work remotely at least part-time and those who can access good-paying white collar jobs. This may require certain levels of education and/or job experience.

For years, I have read discussions about how Americans who need cheaper housing could move to places with cheaper housing. Particularly in comparison to the most expensive housing markets, often on the coasts, there is decent housing to be had in other places. This is easier than it looks. People have ties to particular social and family networks as well as places. Additionally, if a lot of people moved to these cheaper places, this drives the prices up.

What might a more accurate version of this story be (and someone must have some data to support or counter this)? Something like: those with some resources and education can move to the Midwest for particular jobs and take advantage of comparatively cheaper housing compared to high-priced housing markets. This means this potential opportunity is not necessarily available to everyone.

Las Vegas quickly on the (sports) map

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It is rare for a city to add professional sports teams at the rate at which Las Vegas is going:

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With the potential for a city to add an NBA franchise in time for 2028, Vegas could go from no Big Four teams to become the 13th city with an MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL team in the span of 11 years.

Several things may have happened in a relatively short amount of time:

  1. The city has grown rapidly in recent decades. The city had 125,787 people in 1970 (too small to have 4 sports franchises), 258,295 in 1990 (still on the smaller side), and 583,756 people in 2010 (a big city).
  2. It is a new market. This presents a chance to have new fans.
  3. Gambling is now okay with every major sport because of the revenue generated. That obstacle is gone.
  4. The city and other governments are willing to provide public money for stadiums. Owners and teams really like this.

At some point, Las Vegas will not grow like it has in the past (it already slowed between 2010 to 2020 to 10%). At some point, a team might want to leave Las Vegas for greener pastures. But for now, Las Vegas is a shiny new sports city. If the NBA does indeed start a franchise there in the next few years, the teams in the four major sports help give the city and region a certain status.

Lower US birth rates, closing K-12 schools

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What happens in American communities when schools close because there are fewer kids?

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The district is one among many in the United States that have closed schools and are considering closing more. One of the primary reasons is that many adults in the US are simply not having kids, or having fewer of them. And an increasing number of those who do are instead sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling them.

That trend, experts say, means that more US schools are becoming underenrolled, which places school districts in a difficult financial situation because that decline in students means they get less public funding. They must then decide between uprooting students from familiar surroundings and friends or keeping those institutions open even if it doesn’t make fiscal sense…

While districts had planned for fewer students in the coming years, the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated virtual learning accelerated that downturn, Dee said. In fall of 2020, enrollment in US public schools decreased by 1.1 million, according to a study co-authored by Dee.

This trend could have lots of different effects. What happens in communities where schools brought people together and also served like community centers? There might be other settings that could serve this purpose but schools have a way of bringing parents, students, and community members together. What happens to the school properties; how will they be used in the future? A school may have been there for decades and the neighbors might not like what is proposed next for the land. Or they may not like a vacant building if the property is not sold or there is limited interested in redevelopment.

Since Americans tend to think growth is good, do these changes also lead people to think schools are failing or doing worse? If the cause of closing schools is primarily having fewer schools, will people perceive schools are not doing what they should? Even more complicated: local populations could be growing or not declining and schools could still close if fewer people are having children.

Finally, what are good ways to memorialize or celebrate a school and what it meant when it closes? Even if the building is no longer there or it is no longer home to students, there are ways to keep its memory alive.

More Chicago suburbs now have majority-minority populations

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Analysis from WBEZ shows more Chicago suburbs have a majority of nonwhite residents:

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Skokie is one of more than thirty Chicago-area suburbs that have shifted from majority-white communities to majority non-white ones in the past two decades, according to a WBEZ analysis of demographic data for nearly 300 suburbs in Cook County and the five collar counties from 2005 to 2024…

Between 2015 and 2024, 18 suburbs flipped from majority-white to majority non-white, up from 12 during the prior 10-year period spanning 2005 through 2014.

Many suburbs today are no longer the white, middle-class enclaves of the mid-20th century, said Willow Lung, an associate professor of urban studies and planning and director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network at the University of Maryland…

Overall, an increase of more than 600,000 nonwhite suburban residents over the last two decades completely offset the region’s loss of white suburban residents.

This is part of a nationwide trend where suburbs are increasingly diverse by race, ethnicity, and social class.

At the same time, the final paragraph cited above hints at another change; white suburbanites in the Chicago region leaving for elsewhere. What happens then in these suburbs as populations change? The article describes broad patterns but there are likely also interesting stories of what communities have become as their residents change. This could affect how a community sees itself, amid other possible reactions.

Will these patterns continue in the coming years in the Chicago region with more suburbs becoming majority non-white? And will white residents continue to leave for other suburbs or move out of the region all together? If both continue, how long until the image of “white, middle-class enclaves” of suburbia is no longer common?

Wait, the Midwest is growing?

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Recent population data suggests population growth is happening across the Midwest:

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Only one region of the country, the Midwest, saw every one of its states gain population between July 2024 and July 2025. The Midwest population has grown steadily each year since 2023, including slight gains in what the Census Bureau calls “natural change” ‒ births minus deaths.

Marc Perry, a senior demographer for the Census Bureau, said for the first time in the 2020s, the Midwest saw net positive domestic migration ‒ more people moving to the region from elsewhere within the United States, a “notable turnaround” from population losses in 2021-2022.

A region that has had population loss in a number of cities. A region with lots of lost industrial activity and jobs. A region used to decline so why not experiment?

The population gains are modest: the population increase was several hundred thousand across the entire region. But what if that continued for a few more years? What if other populous states lose people and the Midwest slowly gains?

Of course, it would be interesting to know why the Midwest has grown in the last few years. Business activity? Cheaper housing compared to other locations? A particular lifestyle? It’s not the warmth and sunshine.

The pandemic gives residents to some places, the years afterward take them away

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What happened to the places that gained residents during the pandemic? Some are now experiencing less growth:

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Flash forward to today, and the big “winners” of the work-from-home reshuffle — metros that drew hordes of footloose workers and disaffected coastal dwellers — have turned into losers. Fewer people are moving to so-called Zoomtowns. Home listings are piling up on the market. Prices are dropping. The anxiety has shifted from buyers trying to elbow their way in to sellers just trying to offload their properties. A new report by the real estate analytics firm Parcl Labs, shared exclusively with Business Insider, shows that home sellers in the lower half of the US, also known as the Sun Belt, are the most desperate in the country…

Housing demand surged early in the pandemic — the country’s homeowning ranks swelled by a whopping 2.2 million people between the first quarter of 2020 and the same point in 2022, an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies shows. But for all the talk of upheaval, movers more or less stuck to those pre-pandemic flight patterns — just at warp speed. People kept migrating from big-city centers to the suburbs and from the North to the South. Sun Belt states, including Florida, Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina, experienced the largest population gains from domestic migration between mid-2020 and mid-2021, per a Harvard analysis of Census data. The Dallas metro, for example, gained around 63,000 people from other parts of the country that year, a huge jump from just 19,000 the year prior. Phoenix, Tampa, Austin, and Charlotte recorded similar increases. Expensive states with large urban areas, including California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, saw the biggest losses…

The North-to-South movement still holds, but the North is losing fewer people, and the South isn’t gaining like it once was. The most recent numbers, for the yearlong period ending in mid-2024, show net domestic migration to the South was down almost 38% compared to the first year of the pandemic. Domestic migration to the Midwest, on the other hand, is up about 60% in that same period, though it’s still negative in absolute terms. The Northeast’s net loss was down to 192,000 in the latest tally, compared to a loss of 390,000 at the height of the pandemic. With the migration tide receding, sellers in once-hot metros are getting real. In Denver, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and a smattering of other Sun Belt markets, more than half of single-family homes for sale have seen a price cut, Parcl Labs data shows. In the Boston, Philadelphia, and Buffalo metros, the share of listings in that bucket drops to fewer than a third.

That’s just one metric. To gauge sellers’ desperation these days, Parcl Labs created what it calls the Motivated Sellers Index, which combines four factors: the number of price cuts on home listings, the time in between those cuts, the size of the price decreases, and the length of time homes are spending on the market. The higher the score, the greater the homeowners’ urgency to sell. The lower half of the US, with the exception of much of California, is awash in high scores, indicating sellers are ceding negotiating power to buyers. Same goes for much of the West. The Midwest and Northeast, on the other hand, registered some of the lowest scores in the nation: Sellers there are sitting pretty by comparison.

This is something I have wondered about a lot in recent years and even addressed, with Ben Norquist, in a chapter in my book Sanctifying Suburbia: in today’s world of smartphones, the Internet, and easy travel, why do people and organizations stay where they do when they could be located almost anywhere?

Evangelical non-profits described the benefits of being near other evangelical organizations. They thought they could find employees in certain places and could partner with other actors in the community. Some had long histories in their community while others had made a major move to help their budget.

Residents do not just go where there is cheap housing or plenty of jobs. They have ties to places and people. Moving comes with its own costs.

So some more people moved related to the pandemic following similar patterns in previous decades: away from metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. And that appears to be continuing, but at a slower pace and with some indicators that the rapid growth in the South and West is slowing. What does this all mean?

Perhaps the pandemic years were an aberration. Yes, people can work from home but this is not what all companies and organizations want. Bring a bunch of new people to new places and the housing prices go up and the communities change.

Does this mean all that movement would stop completely? Or that places in the Northeast and Midwest would grow? Not necessarily. Long-term patterns are hard to break.

If New York City elects a progressive mayor, how many wealthy residents will flee for Westchester County?

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With a mayoral election coming up in New York City, some residents are considering moving elsewhere:

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As the reality settles in that Zohran Mamdani — a steadfast Democratic Socialist — may soon become New York City‘s mayor, many city-dwellers are planning their escape route.

This is because the policies at the core of Mamdani’s campaign are largely unpopular with wealthy and upper-middle class New Yorkers…

‘We are absolutely seeing a correlation between Zohran Mamdani’s surprise win in the Democratic primary and an uptick in real estate interest in Westchester,’ Zach and Heather Harrison, real estate agents in the area, noted.

‘Since the summer, nearly every buyer from the city we have taken out to see homes in Westchester has mentioned the mayoral election as one of the drivers for shopping in the suburbs,’ they told Realtor.com.

Since Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, sales going into contract in Westchester County are up 15 percent compared to the same period last year, according to The Harrison Team…

In comparison to New York City, Westchester offers more space, lower crime rates, and often lower effective taxes.

Several quick thoughts:

  1. The article is vague on numbers. How many people have moved or might move? And separate from how many do move, how many would have to move for it to be meaningful as a media story or make a substantial difference in local activity?
  2. We hear similar claims about political changes or taxes at the state or national level; people with resources will leave if they think they are being targeted and/or conditions are better elsewhere. I do not know if I have heard this before suggesting people will move from the city to that city’s suburbs.
  3. Westchester County could be a paradigmatic suburban county in the United States. It borders New York City and it grew quickly in the early 1900s. It became a wealthy suburban setting with many houses, access to the city via highway and railroad, some green spaces and waterways, and home to major corporations. Would an influx of wealthy New York City residents feed into the character of the county or alter it at all?
  4. At what point would policies or conditions need to change for most of wealthy residents of a city to leave?

The populations of the “safest and wealthiest suburbs” in the US

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A new list of high income and low crime suburbs has this top ten:

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  1. Western Springs, IL
  2. Lexington, MA
  3. Winchester, MA
  4. Whitefish Bay, WI
  5. Huntington Woods, MI
  6. Ottawa Hills, OH
  7. Winnetka, IL
  8. Kenilworth, IL
  9. University Park, MD
  10. Upper Arlington, OH

Here is how GOBankingRates.com developed the list:

GOBankingRates analyzed the top 1,000 cities by household mean income across the United States to find the safest and richest cities using data from the US Census American Community Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, Zillow Home Value Index, Federal Reserve Economic Data, AreaVibes, and the FBI. The property crime rate per 1,000 residents, violent crime rate per 1,000 residents, livability score, household mean income, and the average total cost of living were scored for each location and sorted to show the safest and richest cities. All data was collected on and is up to date as of August 4th, 2025.

Based on a recent post about the wealthy and large suburbs of the United States, including Naperville, Illinois, I was curious about the population size of the top ten communities. Here is their population according to Quick Facts:

  1. 13,600
  2. 34,400
  3. 22,900
  4. 13,700
  5. 6,300
  6. 4,500
  7. 12,100
  8. 2,400
  9. 2,400
  10. 35,300

Not all of these are small towns; some might even be considered small cities. All have household mean incomes of over $200,000.

Going further through the top 50 suburbs, few are really large. Naperville comes in at #49, the largest suburb by population on the list by far.

To make this list, a suburb does not have be small and exclusive. It can be slightly larger and exclusive. I wonder if this is due to using the household mean income rather than the median. The mean is more likely to be pulled up by a small number of really high earners while the median gets at the midpoint of the distribution.

If population growth in the US slows, this will make competition between cities for people even more intense

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For cities and communities in the United States, growth is good. It signals progress, status, new development. To be flat in population or to lose residents hints at problems or failure.

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Throughout the history of the United States, the growth rate each decade has been over 10% for every decade except for 4 (1930s, 1980s, 2000s, 2010s). The population growth came through births and immigration. This population growth means many communities could grow. Some places might lose people – such as several prominent cities in the second half of the twentieth century – but there was growth in many places.

So if population growth across the United States slows, how can many cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas also grow? There will be fewer people to go around. This could lead to some different outcomes:

  1. There will be clearer “winners” and “losers” in population.
  2. Communities and commentators could adjust their image of how much growth is needed. They could adjust their expectations down.
  3. Americans could decouple population figures from their ideas about quality of life. Perhaps population change has little relationship with whether communities are doing well.

My guess is that #1 would lead the way as people are used to growth and the perceived benefits that go with it. #2 and #3 could happen but would take time as people adjust to different realities where growth is more limited and fewer communities can expand in population.

And if population growth is harder to attain, what might communities and governments do to try to encourage more of it? Bigger incentives? More advertising? Promoting particular amenities or quality of life concerns?

If the population growth of Atlanta has slowed, where are people going instead?

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Recent data suggests that Atlanta is growing more slowly than in the past:

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Census data show more people from within the U.S. left metro Atlanta than moved to it during the 12 months that ended in mid-2024. It was a modest decline, about 1,330 people. But it heralds a significant moment for the longtime growth magnet: This is the first time metro Atlanta lost domestic migrants since the Census Bureau started detailing these numbers three decades ago.

If people are not moving to the Atlanta, where are they going instead? Here are some hints:

Growth in some other big Sunbelt metros has slowed, too, after pandemic-fueled population surges, including around Phoenix and Tampa, Fla., the census data show. Recent Bank of America change-of-address data also show big metros in the region losing steam…

“We just couldn’t afford to live there and have the lifestyle we wanted,” said Adelia Fish, 29 years old, who left suburban Atlanta with her husband in May for a newly built, three-bedroom home in Chattanooga, Tenn…

Whether that big-metro slowdown continues remains to be seen. But census data also indicate many smaller regions in the South—places like Huntsville, Ala., Wilmington, N.C., and Knoxville and Chattanooga in Tennessee—are picking up the slack. Their metros are all running ahead of pre-Covid trends.

The article hints at multiple reasons for this:

  1. Bigger metropolitan regions like Atlanta have advantages but they are at a point where the costs of living there are now higher – housing costs, traffic, limited housing options.
  2. Smaller metro areas can provide cheaper housing and a smaller scale.
  3. Certain jobs or careers are portable or can be done in multiple places, not just in the biggest metro areas.

What does this do to Atlanta and other places that have been used to growth for decades? It is about status – we are on the rise! – and about planning – continued demand for land and buildings leads to different options.

If these patterns continue, keep on eye on what metropolitan areas become the hot ones in the next 5-10 years. How do they respond to a new status and local changes?