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It might be time to start talking about a New Midwest and an Old Midwest. Minneapolis, Columbus, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha and Madison all grew over 10% in the 2010s, with Kansas City and Grand Rapids just under that. No other metros in the traditional north (Midwest/Northeast) are growing at that rate other than Washington.
It might be time to start talking about a New Midwest and an Old Midwest. Minneapolis, Columbus, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha and Madison all grew over 10% in the 2010s, with Kansas City and Grand Rapids just under that. No other metros in the traditional north (Midwest/Northeast) are growing at that rate other than Washington.
KC's tourism marketing people have already been there:
It might be time to start talking about a New Midwest and an Old Midwest. Minneapolis, Columbus, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Omaha and Madison all grew over 10% in the 2010s, with Kansas City and Grand Rapids just under that. No other metros in the traditional north (Midwest/Northeast) are growing at that rate other than Washington.
I haven't looked at Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha or Madison yet, but I looked at numbers for a lot of Midwest metros (including Columbus, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids and Kansas City), and the difference really stems down to one thing - white population.
Pretty much everywhere in the Midwest (and Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester) are gaining non-white populations at a pretty similar rate proportionate to size. Indy, Columbus and KC may be doing a little better but none are lapping the field. Where they are, though, is in white population (and I'm assuming the same holds for Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha and Madison).
Columbus, Grand Rapids and Indianapolis all have had at least slight white gains on the metro level. Kansas City was a loss of -18,000 (but only 1 percent).
Then, look at the ones that are growing at a slower rate and the white population loss is way higher. I'll put it like this, Akron, a small metro, was able to break even in population (granted, it was thanks to the growing ring of Cleveland burbs it gets credit for) despite losing 42,000 whites.
If that 42,000 loss just goes to beak even, Akron is looking at 8 percent gain for the decade. The same is true pretty much across the board for the metros that are bleeding white population.
The question is why is there such a bleed? Yes, an older white population in those areas does have a ton to do with it, but I don't think that is simply the answer. Is it crime related? If so, Columbus, Indy and Kansas City are just as bad there at the metro level.
The only thing I can think is that outside of Columbus and Madison, those are cities that a fairly isolated and surrounded by a lot of depressed rural white areas so they have become the magnet for younger people trying to get out of those places and to the city.
Columbus and Madison make sense, too, both being state capitals and having their huge flagship state university's located there.
Grand Rapids is an outlier in all aspects. It's not a capital, it doesn't have a large university and it isn't isolated. It does, I guess, have the advantage of being the clear No. 2 city in a large state. The more I think about it, Grand Rapids' growth is the most impressive out of all of these. Probably a place I need to visit. It's not far but I just haven't made it western Michigan above Kalamazoo, and even that was close to 20 years ago.
Grand Rapids is an outlier in all aspects. It's not a capital, it doesn't have a large university and it isn't isolated. It does, I guess, have the advantage of being the clear No. 2 city in a large state. The more I think about it, Grand Rapids' growth is the most impressive out of all of these. Probably a place I need to visit. It's not far but I just haven't made it western Michigan above Kalamazoo, and even that was close to 20 years ago.
Another thing to consider when talking about Grand Rapids as an outlier is that it arguably has the worst weather of all of these cities.
Grand Rapids has Grand Valley State University. It's not a major brand university, but still has a 24k student base, and is a major economic generator for the area. Since 2000 they've spent well over $1billion investing in campuses around the city. At one point it was the cheapest of the state universities in Michigan, and growing the fastest. I don't know if that's the case any more. GR also get's a decent amount of migration from folks looking to leave the bustle of both Detroit and Chicago. It is also a hub of immigration for Latino immigrants who comprise the largest minority group in the area.
Regional leadership in western Michigan has been very strategic/effective at transitioning economy from an old school Midwestern manufacturing center, to a high tech manufacturing area. The biggest investments they have made came in the biomed/tech/education/ and research fields though. Since the 90s the rise of the "medical mile" really shifted the area's economy and attracted/retained educated professionals the area was lacking. The city had a bachelors degree rate under 25% in 2000, it's almost 40% now.
I have family in Michigan that has relocated from SE Michigan to Grand Rapids. I've been to GR, and their reasons for choosing GR are pretty similar to the reasons I've considered moving to GR in the past.
1) Grand Rapids is a gateway to all the beach towns on Lake Michigan. You can day trip to Saugatuk, Holland, Grand Haven, etc from GR. The Michigan beach towns on Lake Michigan are top notch, much nicer than the beaches in SE Michigan/NW Ohio.
2) Grand Rapids hits that sweet spot of offering a lot of amenities while itself not being over crowded. GR has a great beer scene, art scene, and other entertainment options. It is close enough to both Detroit and Chicago that you can quickly sneak away if you want big league options.
3) Yes, the winters are awful. However, GR is equipped to handle the heavy snow and the summers are perfect.
4) In a state famous for its "awful" economy, GR has stood as an outlier of sorts in Michigan.
IMO Pittsburgh's population losses at the metro level can be entirely attributed to the demise of the steel industry as the area's principal employer.
Indeed, Pittsburgh dug itself out of a much deeper hole than other cities did. Steel employment in the Mon Valley absolutely cratered in the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of jobs vaporized; steel used to be 10% of regional jobs, and today it's 1%. Contrast that to, say, auto employment in 1979-1982, which shrank by only ~30%.
Economic shocks typically don't result in people immediately moving away, but instead are one factor that diminishes people's attachment and drives emigration over time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mjlo
Over the last year I've been putting together
Thanks so much! Thinking I might grab the figures to add a column for CAGR.
The difference lies in how those other 150 square miles are developed.
I've been slogging through a Strong Towns study of my native Kansas City, Mo., that argues that the city's decision to follow the very-low-density, freeway-oriented path to growth after World War II has been a disaster for the city and its finances. The study points out that from 1910, when the city made its last pre-WW2 annexation, until 1946, the year before it began a roughly 35-year-long spree of gobbling up hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans around it by annexing the south-side suburb of Marlborough, the city added some 200,000 residents without adding a single square inch of land. Its population of roughly 434,000 that year was only about 1,000 less than its 1990 trough of 435,000 — but those 435,000 residents in 1990 lived on more than five times as much land — 316 square miles as opposed to 60.
What does that last stat tell you about what the Kansas City of 1940 must have looked like compared to the one of today?
I don't know whether I posted this comment in this thread or another, but somewhere here, I recently wrote that the zenith of Kansas City's evolution into a great American city came in the 1930s, when several notable civic buildings (Municipal Auditorium, City Hall, Jackson County Court House) and institutions (Nelson-Atkins Museum, University of Kansas City [now UMKC]) opened. (The start of work on the Country Club Plaza in 1921 and the opening of the Kansas City Museum of History and Science in 1940, right after Boss Tom Pendergast was laid low, bracket this period. I've also maintained that everything that makes Kansas City cool today can be traced to the Pendergast era.)
Up until the last two decades, all of Kansas City's growth has occurred on the fringe as the core of the old pre-WW2 city hollowed out. I took a photo of downtown Kansas City from the southeast in 2014 that ran with a sidebar to a feature I wrote for Next City about the Power & Light District in 2015 that I couldn't have taken when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s because I would have been standing inside someone's house. Everything in the foreground save for one forlorn stone city building was grass — an old historically Black residential neighborhood had reverted to prairie.
A resurgence in the core, led by a huge increase in the downtown resident population, has contributed to Kansas City recording its largest population ever (by about 1,000 over its 1970 peak of 507,330) in this Census, but the fringe-oriented growth model remains dominant. And the central point Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn makes about that sort of development is: It doesn't generate the tax revenue needed for its own upkeep. The overarching point being made in that "Growing into Decline" case study is that the sprawling, autocentric development style almost all American cities have pursued since World War II is financially unsustainable, and Kansas City, which has more freeway lane-miles per capita than any other US city, can serve as a poster child for this point.
Columbus has grown since 1960 in the same fashion that Kansas City has: by sprawling at the edges rather than densifying as Kansas City did in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. (And even though the city's population density was comparable to that of Chicago or Philadelphia today, even that denser KC of 1940 was overwhelmingly a city of single-family homes on their own lots. Viewed from the air, however, the houses were built in very close proximity to one another, much as they are in California suburbs today.)
That's the reason why Columbus gets dinged and Pittsburgh doesn't. In fact, your very last sentence hints at this difference.
Columbus has not annexed significantly since the 1970s. It added about 120 square miles during the height of that process. It occurred mostly because of local water issues at the time. Regardless, it grew more the past 10 years with virtually no area size expansion than any other decade on record. Its density is approaching 3x that of Kansas City. Its growth in population and density was in virtually every corner of the city, old or newer neighborhoods alike, with the majority of growth occurring in long-established areas rather than the far-flung fringes.
Also, Columbus' area size is about middle of the pack in terms of major US cities. There is no reason to ding them at 219 square miles, but overlook others that have hundreds of additional square miles within their borders and continuing to expand into farmland. KC has 100 more square miles as it is.
I haven't looked at Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha or Madison yet, but I looked at numbers for a lot of Midwest metros (including Columbus, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids and Kansas City), and the difference really stems down to one thing - white population.
Pretty much everywhere in the Midwest (and Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester) are gaining non-white populations at a pretty similar rate proportionate to size. Indy, Columbus and KC may be doing a little better but none are lapping the field. Where they are, though, is in white population (and I'm assuming the same holds for Minneapolis, Des Moines, Omaha and Madison).
Columbus, Grand Rapids and Indianapolis all have had at least slight white gains on the metro level. Kansas City was a loss of -18,000 (but only 1 percent).
Then, look at the ones that are growing at a slower rate and the white population loss is way higher. I'll put it like this, Akron, a small metro, was able to break even in population (granted, it was thanks to the growing ring of Cleveland burbs it gets credit for) despite losing 42,000 whites.
If that 42,000 loss just goes to beak even, Akron is looking at 8 percent gain for the decade. The same is true pretty much across the board for the metros that are bleeding white population.
The question is why is there such a bleed? Yes, an older white population in those areas does have a ton to do with it, but I don't think that is simply the answer. Is it crime related? If so, Columbus, Indy and Kansas City are just as bad there at the metro level.
The only thing I can think is that outside of Columbus and Madison, those are cities that a fairly isolated and surrounded by a lot of depressed rural white areas so they have become the magnet for younger people trying to get out of those places and to the city.
Columbus and Madison make sense, too, both being state capitals and having their huge flagship state university's located there.
Grand Rapids is an outlier in all aspects. It's not a capital, it doesn't have a large university and it isn't isolated. It does, I guess, have the advantage of being the clear No. 2 city in a large state. The more I think about it, Grand Rapids' growth is the most impressive out of all of these. Probably a place I need to visit. It's not far but I just haven't made it western Michigan above Kalamazoo, and even that was close to 20 years ago.
Columbus city actually had a small White population decline this last decade- Non-Hispanic White still grew. Its population growth was driven almost entirely by racial minorities, particularly Asians and Hispanics.
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