Shrinking cities (Pittsburgh, Washington, Penn: standard of living, statistics, moving to)

[PPG]

Just saw this on the news today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17954186

It says that the Pittsburgh area lost the most population while Atlanta gained the most. Pittsburgh has lost 60,000 people from 2000 to 2006. Is this good for the future if this trend continues?

[Hopes]

I personally like the fact that Pittsburgh doesn't have a large population of uneducated immigrants.

I don't want to live in a large city. I have no need for traffic jams. I like Pittsburgh just the way it is.

[Smoker]

I saw it on TV. They said we look worse than it is because Pgh. has more deaths than births and don't have the immigration many other cities get. They went into further detail and we're moving up despite what it looks like.

I'm with Hopes in not wanting (uneducated and thus troublesome) immigrants.

[bboy36win]

Originally Posted by pimpsgangtasandhustlas

Just saw this on the news today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17954186

It says that the Pittsburgh area lost the most population while Atlanta gained the most. Pittsburgh has lost 60,000 people from 2000 to 2006. Is this good for the future if this trend continues?

It signals a lack of economic growth ... and that's not good.

[Smoker]

Yes, we need jobs to attract more young people back to the city.

[Hopes]

Here's an interesting article titled "Young people are NOT leaving Pittsburgh." http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/co...dchris05p1.asp

It states that there is only a .1 percent (1 out of 1,000) drop in population among our 20 somethings, and Pittsburgh retains a larger percentage of it's current population than many other cities.

Check out the article. It covers many interesting things like Pittsburgh's increase in standard of living.

[JoeP]

I posted on this in another thread, but anyway... most cities (and certainly most other Northeastern cities... and many other metros in the country) are losing in terms of domestic migration (Americans to and from a region).

Many cities are losing in more significant numbers than Pittsburgh. So why is Pittsburgh the one with a total net loss? Well the collapse of the steel industry 20-30 years ago had ripple effects. Children. Or the lack there of. The region immediately aged with the exodus of the 70s and 80s. With a gap in child bearing couples, the birth rate slipped... old folks (of which there became a higher percentage than normal) started dying in higher numbers, while births were at lower numbers. This cycle didn't peak in the 70s and 80s, but rather in the 90s and apparently hasn't reversed yet.

All of these other cities I mentioned that are losing in domestic migration are getting significant numbers of foreign migration and are having more births than deaths.

These cities would have had overall net losses too.

Her are some domestic migration numbers from 2005:

Here's the NET domestic migration number for 2005:

Net domestic migration in 2005 for a few cities:

Boston: -50,025

Philly: -14,926

NYC: -264,770

Pgh: -11,544

DC: -24,872

[Hopes]

Joe,

I found those numbers to be very interesting. But to be fair let's figure out the the percentage of migration in relation to the populations.

Boston: 589,141 .0849

Philly: 1,517,550 .0098

NYC: 19,254,630 .013

Pittsburgh: 334,563 .034

DC: 550,521 .045

It looks like Pittsburgh is only doing better than Boston and DC, not NYC and Philly.

Furthermore, many of those NYC residents are still part of the NYC metropolitian area. Pennsylvania is gaining many of those NYC residents. They haven't left the NYC metropolitian area----they're extending the NYC metropolitian area into Pennsylvania. Just read the threads in the Pennsylvania forum and you'll see that people from Long Island and Brooklyn are moving to western PA and commuting into NYC.

I'm sure the same is true about the Washington DC population. They're probably not leaving the area. They're probably just expanding the greater metropolitan area.

[JoeP]

Those are not city numbers, they are metro numbers. For most any discussion of a "city" metropolitan statistics are given, not city proper since they are not accurate to the population center's actual population.

[SamInTheBurgh]

Originally Posted by Hopes

Here's an interesting article titled "Young people are NOT leaving Pittsburgh." http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/co...dchris05p1.asp

It states that there is only a .1 percent (1 out of 1,000) drop in population among our 20 somethings, and Pittsburgh retains a larger percentage of it's current population than many other cities.

With all due respect that's a bunch of crap. Young people are leaving here in droves. More than half the friends I have had over the years have all moved south or west and I have two more that are leaving this year. I don't know where the PG got their supposed data from, but I have experienced the mass exodus firsthand and plenty of others will tell you the same thing.