It’s official. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are all losing population:
The New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas are all losing people, according to 2018 population estimates just released by the Census Bureau. But other coastal regions—the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, along with the traditional Sunbelt boomtowns—continue to grow.
Ninety-four metro areas, representing about a quarter of the nation’s total, lost population last year on a region-wide basis. This includes nine major metros of more than 1 million people. Among them were the three biggest: New York (down 19,474 people, or 0.10 percent), Los Angeles (down 7,223, or 0.05 percent), and Chicago (down 22,068, or 0.23 percent).
says Aaron M. Renn at City Journal. I would venture to say that without the massive subsidies that New York has benefited from over the last several decades its population would be fleeing even faster.
He also takes note of the city of my birth:
Two of America’s most troubled cities continued their downward population slide. Baltimore lost 7,346 people (1.20 percent) and St. Louis 5,028 (1.63 percent). Baltimore is on track shortly to fall below 600,000 people, and St. Louis will soon have fewer than 300,000 residents. The loss in St. Louis is particularly acute, with the city having hemorrhaged 65 percent of its population from its 1950 peak—worse than Youngstown or Flint.
Baltimore and St. Louis have a number of things in common other than that they are losing people. Both have very large black populations; in both the city is itself a county.
What I find most distressing about all of that is that growth seems to be synonymous with subsidy. If it’s subsidized, it grows. If it’s not, it declines. What sectors are growing month after month? Government, education, and health care. They are also the most highly subsidized sectors. That’s not a formula for success.
Here’s something that might not have occurred to you. Due to the structure of Social Security it subsidizes Sun Belt states at the expense of Northern states. Wage incomes are taxed to finance the system and, historically at least, most wage incomes have been paid in the North. Taxing those incomes results in less spending in the North than would otherwise have occurred. When people move south as they age and collect their Social Security retirement incomes in their new homes, it results in more spending and, consequently, more economic growth in those places than otherwise would have taken place. That may resolve itself in time but that does nothing for Northern cities now.
I can think of a half dozen different ways of collecting that policy flaw, none of which would be popular in the slightest.
Here’s something else that might not have occurred to you. As a society we have no orderly way of dealing with cities that have experienced rapid population decline, cf. Detroit.
