Social Policy

Local Economies Drive Population Shifts

The end of the recession in California and pro-business policies elsewhere have lured people to certain areas of the country, according to county population estimates released by the Census Bureau yesterday. The report also showed the continuation of a trend toward relocation to far-flung suburbs on the outskirts of urban centers.

The nation's total population is estimated to have increased 0.9 percent in the nation's 3,142 counties last year. The largest gains occurred in the South and West.

  • Populations in the western states grew by 1.6 percent last year and by 1.3 percent in the South.

  • The Northeast gained only 0.2 percent and the Midwest registered only a 0.6 percent increase.

  • California's economic recovery transformed a population loss of 430,000 in 1994 into a gain of 410,655 last year.

  • A handful of cities in the largely agricultural Great Plains lured firms with business- friendly tax incentives -- making Lincoln County just outside Sioux Falls, S.D., for example, the second-fastest-growing county in the nation, with a 9.9 percent increase last year.

Douglas County, south of Denver, topped the population growth list for counties with 10,000 or more people for the fourth year in a row. Population there jumped 12.9 percent and has risen 109 percent since 1990.

  • Five of the top ten population-gaining counties are in the South -- three in Georgia, and one each in Virginia and Texas.

  • None of the ten was located in the Northeast.

  • Analysts point out that these population movements also portend important shifts in political power -- with the South, in particular, gaining at the Northeast's expense.

More than a million New Yorkers moved out of that city during the 1990s, but new immigrants and children born to them have more than replaced those who left. Nevertheless, the city's total population was only half a percentage point higher than at its lowest point in the decade, which was in 1991.

Sources: Haya El Nasser, "Population Moves Deeper into Suburbs," USA Today. and James Dao, "New York City Grows, Even as Many Leave," New York Times, both March 18, 1998.


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