Tag Archives: population

Exodus of black residents from Chicago’s South Side

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A long-time resident of Chicago’s South Side discusses the movement of black residents to other locations:

For South Side residents, the writing has been on the wall. Starting as a slow trickle into the suburbs as industrial jobs began drying up in the 1970s, black flight increased in the 2000s, with blacks seeking the suburbs like never before — as well as places like Georgia, Florida or Texas, according to U.S. Census data.

The population shift has folks like myself, left behind on the South Side, feeling like life after the rapture, with relatives, good friends and classmates vanishing and their communities shattering. A recent study found that nearly half of the city’s African-American men between 20 and 24 were unemployed or not attending college…

Every senseless death, every random shooting and every bullet-riddled weekend means another family, another frightened parent must make the decision to stay or go.

Those of us left behind must deal with the aftershocks: lessening political clout, limited public services and the creep of poverty and crime into neighborhoods like South Shore and Auburn-Gresham.

Even as some trumpet the demographic inversion of metropolitan areas other research suggests poor neighborhoods, particularly in Rust Belt cities, can often slowly lose residents. On one side, there is a lot of attention paid to whiter and wealthier residents moving into urban cores and hip neighborhoods while on the other side, little attention is granted to disadvantaged neighborhoods. In some of these neighborhoods, it is remarkable just how much open space there can be as buildings decay and few people clamor to move in (think of Detroit and its urban prairies as an example).

Predicting resegregation in 35% of metro area neighborhoods

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A new study looks at the possibility of numerous metropolitan neighborhoods becoming less diverse in the coming decades:

Neighborhood integration is a great goal, but just because a place is currently home to more than one race doesn’t mean it will retain this diversity in the decades to come. A new study published in Sociological Science explores this potential future for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. It finds that 35 percent of all neighborhoods in these cities—around 3,800 total—are likely to resegregate in the next two decades…

Bader’s analysis predicts that, in the next two decades, many of the neighborhoods in the pale green (“steady black succession”), navy blue (“Latino enclaves”), royal blue (“early Latino growth, white decline”), teal (“early Latino growth, black decline”), sky blue (“recent Latino growth”), and pink (Asian growth) categories are the ones where a single racial group will become dominant over time. Here’s Bader on that process, again via the study website:

“We were disappointed to learn that many integrated neighborhoods were actually experiencing slow, but steady resegregation — a process that we call “gradual succession.” The process tended to concentrate Blacks into small areas of cities and inner-ring suburbs while scattering many Latinos and Asians into segregating neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area.

Meanwhile, the fuchsia “quadrivial” neighborhoods, located in the suburbs like Aliso Viejo, California, and Naperville, Illinois, are likely to retain their diversity for some time. (Of course, as my colleague Amanda Kolson Hurley has noted, in general, diverse suburbs aren’t immune to the threat of resegregation.) Despite fair housing and civil rights legislations, housing discrimination is an ongoing problem with multigenerational effects—and one of the possible reasons behind the trends Bader has highlighted in the study. Another is the tendency of white Americans to self-segregate.

Given the complexity of race and ethnicity in the United States plus its regular manifestation in residential patterns, this makes sense. Just because certain locations were once diverse doesn’t mean they will remain so in the future. City neighborhoods provide plenty of examples of this, whether looking at places that have had waves of immigrant groups or other locations where blacks moved in and whites never returned. And that these patterns will be reproduced across suburban areas has already been happening for decades.

What seems to be new here is the possibility of predicting these changes. If a suburban community knew that demographic change was likely, would they do things differently? Or, how about a city neighborhood that had a particular character and identity? Now that there are scholars out there working on this, might the research itself have an effect on future population changes?

Balkanized suburbs and declining local revenues

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A story about several suburbs outside Philadelphia highlights a problem facing many suburban communities: how can they counter declining revenues when residents and businesses move away?

Pennsylvania’s Delaware County is a crazy quilt of municipalities. Just to the west of Philadelphia, it is home to some of the oldest suburban communities in America. It is dense, with more than half a million people packed into townships and boroughs as small as a half square mile. Such tight confines can make governance difficult under any but the best conditions.

If a neighborhood starts to change in a way its middle-class residents don’t like, they can move a few miles to a newer house, a better school district, and lower property taxes. The communities they leave behind are faced with the impossible math of declining revenues, rising taxes, and an increasingly needy population…

But Hepkins’ most attainable plan is his ongoing effort to lash Yeadon together more tightly with its neighboring municipalities. He dreams of creating a non-profit 311 call center that could cover the six eastern Delaware County municipalities served by the William Penn School District. This centralized office could connect residents with immigration, veteran, and senior services…

The mayors of Lansdowne and East Lansdowne have been receptive to Hepkins’ advances, but his other three counterparts are hesitant. Even if the local politicians do overcome their own parochial interests, it’s an open question how much resource-sharing between six struggling municipalities would accomplish. A system incorporating the region’s more prosperous communities would be far more advantageous, akin to the revenue-sharing policies utilized in the Twin Cities metro region. But nothing like that is being seriously discussed in the Philadelphia area.

Several thoughts come to mind:

  1. This is a reminder that suburbia is much more diverse than the standard image of white and wealthy communities. Suburbs have increasing numbers of non-white and poor residents and there are various types of suburban communities ranging from bedroom suburbs to industrial centers.
  2. Local governments are often very reliant on property taxes. And Pennsylvania has a lot of local taxing bodies though it trails Illinois. Thus, suburban communities are very interested in wealthier residents as well as businesses that can bring in money through property taxes and sales tax revenue. This creates a kind of competition that is difficult for everyone to win.
  3. A number of metropolitan regions and urban communities in the United States have considered ways to band together to tackle common economic and social issues. This can be hard to do because one of the features people like about the suburbs is having more local control. Moving local revenues to another community – even if it is needed or might benefit the region as a whole – can be a hard sell, particularly in better off suburban communities.

I suspect we’ll see more and more stories like this in the years to come.

Declining American homeownership illustrated in Las Vegas

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That city that may have been the exemplar of the early 2000s housing boom may now provide good evidence of a shift from owning to renting in the United States:

The shift to rental in single-family homes is visible on streets like Recktenwall. Between 2005 and 2009, about 80% of such houses in greater Las Vegas were owner-occupied; by 2013, that had dropped to 71%, a 12,000-unit shift…

But the homeownership decline is not entirely tragic. For the footloose, the empty-nested, the risk-averse and assorted others (contract workers, military servicemembers) renting makes sense…

The housing crash’s ground zero was Las Vegas. People who thought you couldn’t lose money on a house lost everything. At one point, an astonishing three quarters of Las Vegas mortgage holders owed more on their homes than they were worth, a percentage that still hovers around 25%.

That’s one of many factors suppressing home sales. Another is the fact that millions of houses have been flipped to rentals by investors who snapped them up at rock-bottom prices years ago.

This long article that covers presidential support of homeownership in recent decades to the perks of some newer apartment complexes presents an interesting conundrum: Americans – including young adults – tend to say that they would prefer or aspire to own a home but for a variety of reasons – from bad credit to tight credit in the mortgage industry to uncertain jobs to college loans to better perks in rental complexes to more options like single family homes available for rent – see renting as desirable at the moment. Some of this might only be determined over time; will the housing market conditions continue to push people toward renting? And, if this happens, does the aspirations of owning a home also slowly decline?

What would be helpful to see with this article that uses Las Vegas: where has the population increased or declined in the metropolitan region over the last ten years or so? While the single-family home market was hit hard, does that mean the suburbs lost people and residents moved closer to the region’s center?

Competing population projections for Chicago

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I highlighted one recent prediction that Chicago would soon trail Houston in population. Yet, another projection has Chicago gaining people and holding off Houston for longer. Which is right?

Data released by the Illinois Department of Health in February show that the population for Chicago, about 2.7 million in 2010, could decrease by 3 percent to 2.5 million by 2025. Meanwhile, Houston’s population could reach 2.54 million to 2.7 million in 2025, according to the Reuters report. But a recent population estimate by the Census Bureau shows an increase in population, rather than a decrease.

Census estimates released in June show that the population of Chicago increased by 1 percent from 2010 to 2014. So why is one projection showing a decrease, but another an increase?

Both data sets are based on estimates and assumptions, says Rob Paral, a Chicago-based demographer. Unlike the 2000 or 2010 census, where all residents answer a questionnaire, any interim projections or estimates must use sampling or a formula based on past population statistics to calculate population…

“Trend data do not support any increase in the projections for Chicago in the next 10 years,” said Bill Dart, the deputy director of policy, planning and statistics at the health department. Dart explained that the estimates from the census use a different formula than the health department. And factors such as births, deaths, migration, economic boons or natural disasters can disrupt projections.

Two groups dealing with population data that come to opposite conclusions. Two ways we might approach this:

  1. The differences are due to slightly different data, whether in the variables used or the projection models. We could have a debate about which model or variables are better for predicting population. Have these same kind of variables and models proven themselves in other cities? (Alternately, are there factors that both models leave out?)
  2. Perhaps the two predictions aren’t that different: one is suggesting a slight decline and one predicts a slight increase. Could both predictions be within the margin of error? We might be really worried if one saw a huge drop-off coming and the other disagreed but both projections here are not too different from no change at all. Sure, the media might be able to say the predictions disagree but statistically there is not much difference.

The answer will come in time. Still, projections like these still carry weight as they provide grist for the media, things for politicians to grab onto, and may just influence the actions of some (is Chicago or Houston a city on the rise?).

Houston predicted to soon pass Chicago in population

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Chicago may not last long even as America’s Third City:

Houston has been one of the fastest-growing U.S. cities for years, fueled by an energy industry that provided the backbone of the economy, low taxes and prospects of employment that have attracted job seekers.

But Houston also embodies the new, urban Texas, where political views have been drifting to the left, diversity is being embraced and newer residents are just as likely to drive a hybrid as a pickup truck…

Within eight to 10 years, Houston is forecast by demographers in the two states to pass Chicago, which has seen its population decline for years, as the third-largest city.

Houston is projected to have population of 2.54 million to 2.7 million by 2025 while Chicago will be at 2.5 million, according to official data from both states provided for their health departments. New York and Los Angeles are safe at one and two respectively.

The rise of Houston combined with Chicago’s ongoing population loss could bring more attention to the former city while diminishing the latter. Chicago already dropped behind Toronto in population; how far might Chicago slide? Chicago may like to compare itself to New York but new comparisons to Toronto and Houston might lead to some different kinds of conversations as well as new insights.

Detailed map of population changes in Europe, 2001-2011

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A new map shows the population trends at work in Europe between 2001 and 2011:

Look at the Eastern section of the map and you’ll see that many cities, including Prague, Bucharest, and the Polish cities of Pozna? and Wroc?aw, are ringed with a deep red circle that shows a particularly high rise in average annual population of 2 percent or more. As this paper from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Geography notes, Eastern cities began to spread out in the new millennium because it was their first chance to do so in decades…

We already know from other available data that Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest, but the BBSR map adds complexity to this picture and reveals some interesting micro-trends. The dark blue coloring of the map’s Eastern section shows that the lean years for Eastern states are by no means over. Residents have continued to leave Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia in particular in search of jobs, while even relatively wealthy eastern Germany has been hollowed out almost everywhere except the Berlin region.

Population growth in the Northwest, meanwhile, is far from even. While large sections of Northern Scandinavia’s inland are losing people, there’s still modest growth on the Arctic coasts. And while the Scottish Highlands contain some the least peopled lands in all of Europe, Scotland’s Northeast shows remarkable population gains, a likely result of the North Sea oil industry concentrated in Aberdeen…

Spain’s trends look a little different from those of Europe as a whole. It’s actually in the country’s Northwest where the population has dropped most sharply, notably in the provinces of Galicia and León, which have long been known to produce many of Spain’s migrants.

But other previously impoverished regions, such as Southwestern Murcia, have grown, a trend continuing along the Mediterranean coast where population levels have risen sharply.

All of this may help explain reactions to migrants – population pressure is high in some places, particularly wealthier regions, while population loss is occurring in more economically depressed areas. It is also a helpful reminder of how relatively free people are to move between places. I don’t know how exactly this lines up with historic migration rates – particularly before the rise of nation-states which presumably allowed more of an ability to control population flows – but the industrialized world (and much of the rest of the world as well) is quite a mobile one.

What about American mid-sized metropolitian areas with 500,000 to 1 million residents?

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The biggest American cities get a lot of attention but what about the population changes in smaller big cities? Here is a look at population trends among the 53 metropolitan areas that have between 500,000 and 1 million residents:

The United States has 53 mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations from 500,000 to 1 million. These metropolitan areas together had a population of nearly 38 million in 2014, according to the most recent Census Bureau population estimates (Table). In number, they match the 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1 million population), though they have only one fifth of the population (178 million). The mid-sized metropolitan areas are growing somewhat slower than the major metropolitan areas, at an annual rate of 0.81% between 2010 and 2014, compared to 1.00% in the major metropolitan areas. Combined, the major metropolitan areas and the mid-sized metropolitan areas have two-thirds of the US population…

The 10 fastest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are from every major region of the country except for the Northeast. Cape Coral, FL was the fastest growing between 2010 and 2014. Its growth rate picked up substantially in 2013 to 2014. Cape Coral (formerly called Fort Myers) was hit particularly hard by the real estate bust of the late 2000s. The core municipality itself has not only the usual street system, but an extensive canal system (photo above). It is hard to imagine a metropolitan area that feels less urban…

Virtually all of the slowest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are former industrial behemoths that lost out in the competition for survival in the Northeast and Midwest. A visit to any of these cities will reveal either a relatively strong pre-World War II central business district or the remains of one. Each of these has a built form that looks more like Louisville or Cincinnati than the dominant pattern for new metropolitan areas that developed with a far more modest density gradient and with much weaker cores…

The list of mid-sized metropolitan areas is fluid. As noted above, a number of mid-sized metropolitan areas could move into the major metropolitan category before 2020 or 2030. On the other hand, there will be new mid-sized metropolitan areas. Three seem likely to be added by the 2020 census (Lexington, KY, Lafayette, LA and Pensacola, FL). There should be a rush of new mid-sized metropolitan areas between 2020 and 2030, at current growth rates. This could include Visalia, CA; Springfield, MO; Corpus Christi, TX; Port St. Lucci, FL; Reno, NV; Asheville, NC; Huntsville, AL; Santa Barbara, CA; and Myrtle Beach, SC.

A lot of this seems to mirror broader trends: continued Sunbelt population growth, declining populations in the Northeast and Midwest, big effects of the economic crisis and housing bubble, and slow but steady population growth overall.

While the population data is interesting, it all raises some interesting questions that I know some scholars have taken up even as the lion’s share of attention rests on the bigger cities:

1. Is the experience of living in these cities and regions qualitatively different than living in a larger city? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

2. How does the size of the region affect all sorts of things including a region’s resiliency or ability to grow? In other words, are these places simply scaled down versions of bigger cities or are they something quite different?

3. Given the proclivity of Americans to choose small towns as their preferred places to live, would these kinds of cities offer a preferred lifestyle? (Of course, people still need jobs and want certain amenities so if they had to make tradeoffs between that but a manageable size, does that lead residents to cities like these?

266 US counties have white populations under 50% but are the same processes at work in all of them?

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A recent Pew report shows the counties in the United States with majority-minority populations:

Pew crunched Census numbers from the 2,440 U.S. counties that had more than 10,000 residents in 2013. Whites made up less than half the population in a total of 266 counties. Even though these 266 counties made up only 11 percent of the counties analyzed, they contained 31 percent of the country’s total population, with many of them home to dense urban areas.

Most of these counties are sprinkled around the Sun Belt states in southern part of the country (below).

Of the 25 counties with the largest total populations, 19 now have non-white majorities. As of 2000, six of these (four in California and two in Florida) had white majorities. The most dramatic change within the last decade can be seen in counties in Georgia. The share of white residents in Henry County, for example, fell from 80 percent in 2000 to a little less than 50 percent in 2013.

It is interesting to see where these counties are located and think of the social forces that led to this. Not all of these counties have the same mix of minority groups or the same history. Some of the counties are those with large cities where white populations declined with suburban growth. Some of the counties are in the South with large black populations. There are some counties in the Great Plains, southwest, and northwest that have large Native American populations. There are counties with large Latino populations, largely in the southwest and those involving immigrant gateways. There are also some counties with large Asian populations – the phenomenon behind the concept of ethnoburbs – though I wonder if there are many with 50% or more Asians.

Thus, while this data corroborates the ongoing trend of whites constituting a smaller percentage of the American population (currently around 63%), the increasing minority population is not monolithic nor does it influence all places in the same ways.

Splitting America into equally proportioned states by population; options abound

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Here is an interesting yet probably quite absurd set of maps that split the United States into various configurations of states with equal populations. Two of the maps:

140926_CBOX_Map4-EqualPopulation

140926_CBOX_MapCircles

I can see the logic behind this – more equal representation. However, the others are implausible. If anything, more equal populations might be accomplished by breaking states into smaller units that might be more equal in population to each other as pieces of the larger state. But, trying to imagine merging into megastates or different configurations of the 50 states is hard to imagine.