Big Beats Small, New Beats Old

Maybe there's no more "urban doom loop", but still cause for concern.

Postcard depiction of Cairo, Illinois, circa 1940. Source: ebay.com

I came across a couple of interesting pieces in the last week that had me thinking about the past, present and future of American cities again. After reading them, I felt somewhat upbeat and validated, but also concerned.

The first piece was a research paper by the Brookings Institution's William H. Frey. Frey, a senior fellow for the Brookings Metro research program, conducted an analysis of U.S. Census American Community Survey population estimates for metro areas between 2020 and 2023. He found that large metro areas (those with more than one million residents) have seen a rebound since the peak Covid pandemic period in 2020-21.

According to Frey:

“(t)his includes reduced out-migration and smaller population losses in major metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as shifts from sharp losses to gains in urban core areas such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C.  While natural increase (the excess of births minus deaths) has improved almost everywhere, changing domestic migration patterns and especially a rise in international migration served to benefit population change in large metropolitan areas and their urban core counties.”

That’s great news for people who may have thought the so-called  "urban doom loop" was an existential threat to American cities. I’d like to be on record as saying the urban doom loop phenomenon was overblown, because cities had adaptive and experiential advantages that would always make them attractive. Adaptive, in the sense that our largest and oldest cities have generally gone through multiple phases of development in their histories. Experiential, in the sense that cities increasingly have the economic and social infrastructure that appeals to today’s global movers and shakers. Good news for the nation’s biggest metro areas.

Unfortunately, the news is not so good as the places get smaller. Frey’s analysis includes a review of annual growth rates for small (with between 50,000 and one million residents) as well as non-metro areas (fewer than 50,000 residents) between 2010-11 and 2022-23. Smaller metro areas saw a boost in growth rates beginning in 2019-20, at the expense of the largest metros. That boost leveled off during the 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 periods, as larger metros rebounded. Non-metro areas, places with fewer than 50,000 residents, followed a similar trajectory as did smaller metros. However, overall they did not fare as well, because they were already witnessing population loss or minimal growth at the start of the analysis period.

Another trend was noted in the analysis as well. Generally, larger metros rely heavily on immigration and natural increase for population growth, and far less on domestic in-migration. Smaller metros and non-metro areas rely heavily on domestic in-migration for population growth, and far less on immigration or natural increase. That gap widens as places get smaller. The trend was accelerated during the peak pandemic years but appears to be returning to previous levels. But, in a nation with falling birth rates and a increasing reliance on international immigration to fuel economic as well as population growth, what does this means for smaller metros and even smaller non-metro places?

And that takes us to the next article I found interesting.

The second piece was Daniel Knowles’ excellent piece about Cairo, Illinois for the Economist. Knowles documented the decline of Cairo (pronounced KAY-roe), a city whose location offered great potential that was never fulfilled. Cairo sits at the southern tip of Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Cairo tried to capitalize on its location to become the epicenter of American river barge traffic. But it never happened. Today, Cairo is a shell of its former self; Cairo’s population peaked in 1920 with about 15,000 residents, but now has just 1,700. Knowles goes on to describe the hollowing out of small-town America, and our inability to develop, or even consider, an appropriate policy response. He attributes this to “America’s democratic and administrative peculiarities,” meaning Americans have a highly decentralized system of government, and we move a lot.

Says Knowles:

“In general Americans have long flocked to “Sunbelt” states in the South and south-west. In the past that was not a problem, because the national population was growing fast enough that lots of people could leave the colder, cloudier states in the north-east and Midwest without causing their populations to shrink. But if the population as a whole is barely increasing, for one region to grow fast, another must contract, notes Beth Jarosz of the Population Reference Bureau, a non-profit research organisation that works with the Census Bureau. Growing becomes a zero-sum game.”

He’s right. The article’s title could not be more apt: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population. That’s been proven over the centuries as fur trapping, gold rushes and oil discoveries created boom towns throughout our history that ultimately became ghost towns. Same goes for our nation’s coal mining towns and manufacturing centers. Once the resource that sparks the growth is used up, the people leave.

There are all sorts of stories about the fragmenting of America, along political lines, urban/rural lines, racial and ethnicity lines, social/cultural lines, regional geographic lines, and more. But I think all versions of fragmentation can be summed up simply. We are fragmented by how we live, and the economic prosperity we receive because of our living choice.

It’s becoming clearer each day. We are a nation of prosperous if unequal large metros with populations greater than one million. Those metros make up about sixty percent of the nation’s 340 million people. The remaining forty percent of the nation is comprised of places with fewer than 100,000 people that are struggling to maintain their economic and social viability, and places between 100,000 and one million people that are in various stages of limbo.

Should we accept this, or can bridges ever be built to fix it?