Pa. is now America’s 5th-biggest state
The 2020 census data that was released last Thursday was a mixed bag of results for Pennsylvania.
First off, the Keystone State did see its people numbers crash through the 13 million mark, with a final population count of 13,002,700. That makes Pennsylvania the fifth-largest state in the nation, jumping over Illinois in the 2020 count.
On the other hand, population growth here still ranked among the slowest of all the 50 states, and that means that the state will, in a continuation of a long, dispiriting trend, lose a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives come 2022, and one vote in the Electoral College count for the presidential elections of 2024 and 2028.
Pennsylvania grew by 2.4% through the decade, while the nation as a whole added 7.4%.
“The story is sort of, yes, Pennsylvania continues to be a slowgrowth state. We’re seeing the growth in the same areas that we have in the recent decades, and then, as we would expect, some of our counties continue to become more racially and ethnically diverse,” said Jennifer Shultz, data services manager for the Pennsylvania State Data Center.
Some analysts are concerned that because of Pennsylvania’s aging population, it will be even harder to maintain that traditionally slow and steady growth in the future as deaths start to outnumber births. That already happened in 2020, according to the state’s preliminary numbers, although the coronavirus pandemic may have played a role in that.
But projections run for the state’s Independent Fiscal Office last year also suggested deaths of residents will start to exceed births in Pennsylvania through the next five years, meaning Pennsylvania would have to find ways to slow or reverse its annual net loss of residents to other states — pegged at 20,854 in 2020 — or increase the number of international immigrants, a gain of 14,523 in 2020, to stay on the growth track.
Some other takeaways from an early review of the data:
A tale of two states
Pennsylvania’s long-term trends continue.
Nobody’s found the key to bring growth back to the western and northern sections of Pennsylvania. The data shows that population dropped in almost every county north and west of Interstate 81, with exceptions being Butler, Centre (home to Penn State), Allegheny, Washington and Snyder counties. Translation? Whether you put your stock in the shale boom, the Trump tariffs, medical marijuana or some kind of postpandemic lift for rural communities, nothing yet has shown itself to be transformative for Pennsylvania’s long-term population trends. The Rust Belt areas that once were driven by steel and coal and related industries have yet to find their magic growth elixir.
Meanwhile, the areas south and east of I-81 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike — mostly Philadelphia and its suburban collar counties, the adjacent Lehigh Valley and south-central Pennsylvania — continue to boom.
The secret sauce for those areas seem to be the proximity to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and in the northeast, to New York City. Lower housing prices have helped Pennsylvania pick up new residents from New York, New Jersey and Maryland, and the region has continued to be buoyed by a diverse economy that includes state government, life sciences, education and warehousing and distribution.
Then, too, there’s the synergy that the growth creates, as more people create new markets and new jobs.
“It does feed upon itself, the multiplier effects,” said Matthew Knittel, executive director of the IFO. “Once it gets started it’s kind of a virtuous cycle.”
On the other side of that I81 track? Only five counties reported population growth, and only one of them — Butler County — was in the state’s top 10 for growth.
Good decade for Phila.
The City of Brotherly Love, despite the civic disappointment over not being able to land any really big fish like that once-coveted Amazon headquarters, and ongoing concerns — shared with many large American cities — over the gun crimes, managed to add 77,791 residents over the decade.
That’s the biggest censusto-census change for the state’s largest city since the 1940s, when Philadelphia’s population jumped from 1,931,000 to 2,071,000.
At 1.6 million now, Philadelphia remains the sixthlargest city in the nation.
It started the decade in fifth place, but was passed by the sprawling desert metropolis of Phoenix around the middle of the decade. San Antonio will be hot on Philly’s heels in the decade to come.