ITHACA, NEW YORK
By Cheryl Russell, New Strategist Press
The nation's urban areas are growing, and rural areas are losing people. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the post-Great Recession era. An analysis of county population change along what is called the
Rural-Urban Continuum shows the draw of cities and the abandonment of rural outposts.
The Rural-Urban Continuum is the federal government's way of classifying counties by their degree of urbanity. The continuum is a scale ranging from 1 (the most urban counties, in metropolitan areas of 1 million or more) to 9 (the most rural counties, lacking any settlements of 2,500 or more people and not adjacent to a metropolitan area).
If you sort the nation's 3,143 counties by their rank on the continuum, then measure population change between 2010 and 2012 for each rank, this is the result...
1:
2.2%2:
1.7%3:
1.2%4:
0.2%5:
0.8%6:
-0.4%7:
-0.2%8:
-0.9%9:
-0.5% The most urban counties (a 1 on the scale) grew faster than any other type of county between 2010 and 2012. The most rural counties (8 and 9 on the scale) experienced the biggest declines. This is an interesting twist in the age of the Internet, when location is supposed to be increasingly irrelevant.
City Growth by Size
The more urban the county, the greater the population growth during the 2010 to 2012 time period, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau's county population estimates by county rank on the Rural-Urban Continuum.
But what about cities themselves? An analysis of
population change in the nation's 726 largest cities (incorporated places with populations of 50,000 or more) reveals growth to be uniform regardless of city size.
Overall, the populations of large cities grew 2.1 percent between 2010 and 2012. This was nearly double the 1.1 percent growth outside these cities. By size of city, growth looked like this...
1,000,000 or more:
2.0%500,000 to 999,999:
2.5%250,000 to 499,999:
2.0%200,000 to 249,999:
2.3%150,000 to 199,999:
1.8%100,000 to 149,999:
2.2%50,000 to 99,999:
1.9% Of the 726 largest cities, only 70 lost population between 2010 and 2012.
