For the second year in a row, populations in the country’s largest urban counties have decreased, according to census estimates from The New York Times. These metro areas include Chicago, New York, the San Francisco Bay/Oakland Area and Los Angeles.
While this drop has been influenced by domestic populations moving out of crowded cities to sparsely populated suburbs, lower international migration is seen as a main driver of this decline, with large urban county populations shrinking by 0.3% over the past year.
Urban population growth has been steadily declining since 2012, largely due to the lack of new construction needed to welcome new residents. Coinciding with this trend, lower-density suburban counties have been growing the fastest, with populations increasing by an estimated 1.3% from July 2019–July 2020.
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