I was interested in seeing how St. Louis compared to peers and cities in close geographic range with the latest 2020 Census. To do this, I pulled raw data from the Census Bureau website and selected the following metro areas for comparison:
| Chicago |
| Cincinnati |
| Cleveland |
| Detroit |
| Indianapolis |
| Kansas City |
| Louisville |
| Memphis |
| Milwaukee |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul |
| Nashville |
| Omaha |
Once downloaded I analyzed and graphed data within Excel to come up with what I found to be some interesting trends. I thought that many on this board might be interested to see and so I decided to share.
The first and perhaps most obvious piece of data was to look at raw population changes. For this data I pulled data using MSA, or Metropolitan Statistical Area. I excluded Chicago in this particular graph since its population is so far above the other regions that it made the data difficult to read.
St. Louis is highlighted in yellow. The first item I observed was despite our stagnant population growth, we are still one of the largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest and amongst other rust belt cities. Minneapolis-St. Paul is on a trajectory to surpass Detroit in 20-30 years. Kansas City will soon surpass Cincinnati and threaten to overtake St. Louis as a larger region in a similar timeframe. I hadn't realized the level of growth KC is seeing as a region - something interesting given that we share a state with the same economic policies and party.
The next two graphs provide some further detail. They both show how the population grew for each city within each year in the past decade. The first shows raw growth numbers, and the second shows the rate of growth per year. Again, these use MSA numbers.
Not surprisingly, Nashville showed the strongest growth and stood out by itself. Indy, Omaha, Minn-St. Paul, KC, and Cincy all showed solid growth. At Memphis is where I start to see a trend of decreasing growth followed by cities with population decreases. St. Louis falls in the middle of this. What surprised me was the severity of decline Chicago saw in the latter half of the decade.
Focusing on St. Louis we saw growth through 2015. In 2016, 2018 and 2019 we actually saw a small population decline. The downtrend is consistent across all the other cities as well, with Chicago and Cleveland seeing this occur a year earlier and at a more severe rate.
That's all to share for now. In some future posts I'll dig deeper into the different demographics of the population changes, as well as in comparison to each cities "core" county.
Appreciate any feedback or insights you might have!