Populations of large cities shrank in ’20
Ko Im always thought she would live in New York forever. She knew every corner of Manhattan and had worked hard to build a community of friends. Living in a small apartment, she found her attitude shifting early in the coronavirus pandemic. After her brother accepted a job in Seattle in the summer of 2020, she decided to move there too.
“It was fine until it wasn’t,” Im, 36, said of her time in New York. “The pandemic really changed my mindset about how I wanted to live or how I needed to live.”
Eight of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. lost population during the first year of the pandemic, with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago leading the way. Between July 2020 and July 2021, New York lost more than 305,000 people, while Chicago and Los Angeles contracted by 45,000 residents and 40,000 people, respectively.
San Francisco suffered the largest rate of decline, losing almost 55,000 residents, or 6.3 percent of its 2020 population, the highest percentage of any U.S. city.
The population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau capture a time early in the pandemic and don’t reflect changes since last summer. Whether the virus has permanently altered the urban landscape remains a question.
Brookings Institution demographer William Frey said he believes the population declines in most of the largest U.S. cities from 2020 to 2021 have been “short-lived and pandemic-related.”
Among the 10 largest U.S. cities, only San Antonio and Phoenix gained new residents, but they added only about 13,000 people each, or less than 1 percent of their populations, according to the bureau’s 2021 population estimates.
Among the largest U.S. cities, Austin and Fort Worth in Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Columbus, Ohio, also registered modest population gains.
Reasons for population changes vary from city to city, driven by housing costs, jobs, births and deaths. The pandemic and the lockdown that followed in spring 2020 made living in a crowded city less appealing.