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The One-Minute Geographer: Our Shifting Metropolitan Population
Between 2010 and 2020, the total US population grew from 309 million people to 331 million, an increase of 7.4%.
Much of this growth was in the nation’s 384 officially designated metropolitan areas. (I’ll call them metros.) Now, 86% of Americans live in these 384 metros, an increase of 1% since 2010.
And more than 2/3 of Americans live in the 100 largest metros areas. The specifics: 67.3% live in them in 2020, about a 1% percent increase from 2010.
Yet, and perhaps surprisingly, despite overall population gains in the nation as a whole, and gains in the population of its metro areas, many of the 384 metro areas LOST people from 2010 to 2020: 71 to be exact, which is 18% of all metros.
As you would expect, most of the metros that lost people were in the Rust Belt or in the Great Plains, regions where urban population loss has been occurring for the last few census decades. But there were some surprises, as we will see in a future post. Otherwise-booming states like Texas, Arizona and South Carolina had one or more metros that lost people over the last ten years.
When we look at the 100 largest metros, only three lost population: Toledo and Akron in Ohio, and Syracuse, NY. And all three lost less than 1% of their people.
