Originally Posted by kittyhawk28
2020 Census Population Figures for the Top 5 Most Populous CSA's:
New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area:
2020: 23,582,679
2010: 22,255,491
Change: +1,327,188 (+5.96%)
Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA Combined Statistical Area
2020: 18,644,680
2010: 17,877,006
Change: +767,674 (+4.29%)
Chicago-Naperville, IL-IN-WI Combined Statistical Area
2020: 9,986,960
2010: 9,840,929
Change: +146,031 (+1.48%)
Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area
2020: 9,973,383
2010: 9,050,192
Change: +923,191 (+10.20%)
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area
2020: 9,720,023
2010: 8,923,942
Change: +796,081 (+8.92%)
Commentary:
To start off, the New York Metro area defied premature predictions of its decline, growing an astounding 1.3 million people in the past decade, which in terms of numerical growth puts it on the level of growth Dallas or Houston metro areas experience. What's more interesting is how concentrated this population growth was in the metro area: New York City proper grew by 630,000 people alone between 2010-2020, accounting for about half of the entire metro area's growth. This is in contrast to other metro areas, where population growth is far more concentrated in the suburbs. A caveat however, is that this is likely due to the Census Bureau discovering 265,000 housing units that had been missing from the bureau’s list, and not all neccesarily of it due to new growth during the past decade
For Los Angeles, it experienced a major slowdown in population growth in the 2010-20 decade. Before the 2010's, Greater LA had been the fastest-growing metro area in the US by numerical growth for decades, growing 1.5 million people between 2000 and 2010, compared to New York's growth of a 700K during the same decade. This decade, in contrast, LA's growth halved to just 767,674 new residents. Arguably, the prime cause of this population slowdown is the ballooning housing costs in the region, and California in general, often as a result of local housing restrictions constraining housing supply, despite the growth in jobs; in the last decade, for every 5 jobs that LA has gains, it builds only 1 new home. Thus, it will be interesting to see if recent escalation in actions by the state housing department against local housing restrictions, such as imposing mandatory zoning quotas for at least 1.3 million new housing units (for possibly 3 million new potential residents) for the Greater LA region by 2029, will reverse this slowdown. With the massive rail infrastructure expansions coming online for the 2028 Olympics in the coming decade, LA also has great potential to transform itself and embrace urban densification growth in the coming years, similar to how NYC has done last decade.
Chicago's results for the 2020 census also surprised expectations; where the metro region was expected to show a big population decline in the census, it still grew by almost 150 thousand new residents. Still, Chicago faces challenges which LA or NYC do not; unlike these two metro regions, Chicago lies inland, isolated from the coasts. This makes it harder for Chicago to attract immigrants to its region relative to NYC or LA. Chicago's weather also does it no favor, with the heavy winter weather helping to cause huge outflows of its residents to warmer sunbelt states. Other broader historical factors and trends, such as the general decline in heavy industry in the US, has also hurt Chicago's appeal, with declining industrial jobs and the shuttering of its once-massive steel industries. In any case, Chicago has for a while been the slowest growing out of the top 5 US metro areas, and had it not grown at all during the 2010's, the DC-Baltimore area would have overtaken it.
The DC-Baltimore metro area experienced very fast growth between 2010 and 2020, growing by over 900,000 people, and with the greatest percentage growth out of the 5 biggest metro areas. This is likely driven by the rapid increase in corporate presence in the region, most particularly in aerospace and defense companies. Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, among others, have expanded their corporate presences in the metro area, in order to be closer to the political center of the country. Furthermore, the region has attracted tech companies to increase their presence in the region. The most notable is Amazon, which is planning to built its "HQ2" campus in Crystal City, Virginia, a subcenter of the DC metropolitan area.
The San Francisco Bay Area's population growth is pretty self-explanatory. The explosive growth in digital tech firms during the 2010's definitely fueled rapid growth in the Bay Area, centered around the area known as Silicon Valley (a moniker less accurate these days, as semiconductor production has largely relocated to Asia and Oregon/Arizona away from the Bay Area). But in any case, the region faces much of the same problems that Greater Los Angeles faces: spiralling housing costs. The average cost of a home in San Francisco has now reached $1.5 million, with prices in other parts of the region ballooning as a result of the tech boom. While chatter of a major exodus from the Bay Area and California is largely overrated (judging by the census figures), the underlying trend of lower-income and working class people being priced out and forced to relocate to far-off exurbs, or simply move out of the region altogether. There is a growing trend of super-commutes in the Bay Area; many workers are relocating to once sleepy towns such as Tracy and Stockton (hours inland from the Bay Area) in order to take advantage of cheaper housing costs. Then again, like LA, it will be interesting to see if the Bay Area can wrestle back its exploding housing costs. Like with LA, the State of California has imposed a zoning mandate for about 440,000 new housing units for cities in the Bay Area over the next decade.
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