While pandemic decreases in both immigration and natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) brought lower national population, domestic migration played a primary role in city population losses, as shown in Figure 3 for San Francisco and New York. The pandemic began to affect city growth in 2019-20, and even more so in 2020-21-the first year this century when large cities in aggregate registered a population loss, declining by 1%.Ĭities that showed the greatest percentage losses were San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston. This led many would-be suburbanites-especially millennials-to instead remain in big cities as they delayed family formation and suburban homeownership, which extended higher city growth rates through the early 2010s.Īs the economy and housing market picked up in the mid-2010s, growth in big cities slowed. This trend was reversed later in the decade due to the 2007-09 Great Recession and near collapse of the housing market, which negatively impacted suburban growth. In the first part of the 2000-10 decade, big cities took a downturn as easy credit and growth in metro areas with large, sprawling suburbs brought on a suburban boom. As a group, big cities experienced an absolute population loss during the pandemicīig-city growth has shown variations since the turn of the century.
It then shifts the focus to the suburbs of major metropolitan areas, which-while benefitting somewhat from recent city population losses-tend to display growth slowdowns of their own. This analysis places these estimates in the context of recent decades’ trends, when America’s big cities experienced noticeable ups and downs.
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