The most recent Census population estimates revealed something that the mainstream media would prefer to ignore—the slowing population growth of big cities, including New York. The New York Times, for example, trumpeted Gotham’s historically high population yet failed to mention that the city’s growth is not only dramatically slowing but also, in the case of Brooklyn, declining for the first time since 2006. New York’s rate of growth, impressive earlier in this decade, now ranks among the nation’s lowest, mostly because of rising domestic outmigration. In 2017, nearly three times as many domestic migrants left the city as in 2011. This may be one reason why rents, which have soared for a decade, have begun to flatten, though they remain at a level many potential newcomers may still find difficult to afford.
New York’s population slowdown is hardly unique. Many of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas have seen domestic outmigration surge over the last few years. The highest-percentage declines were found in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and, remarkably, tech-heavy San Jose, which ranked worst among 53 metropolitan areas with populations above 1 million. Last year, the San Francisco Bay Area’s seven metros experienced outmigration more than ten times higher than the annual average since 2010. This includes the “boomtown” San Francisco metropolitan area, which attracted domestic migrants from 2010 through 2015 but saw strong net outmigration last year. At 0.60 percent, San Francisco’s 2017 population growth was half its post-2010 average. In 2017, population growth in Los Angeles was among the lowest in the nation, and at 0.19 percent, down two-thirds from its annual average since 2010.
Read the entire piece at City Journal.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.
Photo: s.yume, via Flickr, using CC License.
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