This morning the Census Bureau released data about how the country’s “incorporated places” (cities, towns, and villages) grew between between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2023. This information is useful and interesting, and is most powerful when contextualized with the population data from recent years.

This first figure shows how the 10 largest US cities have evolved. The trend is clear: southern cities like San Antonio, Phoenix, Jacksonville, and Houston lead the growth pack. Meanwhile, the population has declined in cities in the West (LA), Midwest (Chicago), and Northeast (Philadelphia, New York). In most places, the trends have gone in one direction throughout 2020-23 (though Houston, San Diego, and Dallas shrank in 2020 before growing subsequently).

Most analyses will show percentage changes to illustrate these shifts, but I think this approach diminishes the massive changes happening in New York City, which are most apparent when looking at population changes in absolute terms. New York is really a division in its own right—its size dwarfs any other city in the country (NYC is still more than twice as large as the next nearest competitor, Los Angeles).

New York City’s population continues to shrink, albeit at a slower pace in 2023 than in 2020-2022. The last few years have been the sharpest downturn in the city’s population, occurring at double the pace of the hollowing out that occurred during New York’s ‘doom loop’ in the 1970s.

Another clear trend is that smaller towns are generally shrinking more rapidly, or growing more slowly, than large cities. That said, this trend predates the pandemic, and the differential has shrunk. In other words, big places are growing faster than small places, but by a smaller margin than before 2020.

Putting all of these trends together—the growing South, New York City cratering, and the larger cities generally growing faster than smaller ones—we get the figure below. It ranks places by size, within each Census division, and measures percent population changes since 2020. Places with the strongest population growth are in green:

• The hottest growth is a distillation of all of these trends: southern cities are booming.

• The West is growing in all but the largest places, like San Francisco, San Jose, and Portland.

• Meanwhile, the population has been been shrinking in the Midwest and Northeast, especially in smaller towns.

One of the nice things about loading this data into a programming environment is that you can easily slice and dice it. Sometimes weird and interesting things fall out. Here’s one: amongst shrinkage across the Northeast, two towns in Massachusetts grew rapidly: Amherst and Northampton. I called my cousin who lives in the area and he suggested it might be because all the students from Amherst and U. Mass left in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, and have since returned—hence the booming population when measured from 2020 to 2023.

I hope this was helpful. Paying subscribers can schedule a call with me to discuss these results, and get more granular data and bespoke analysis for specific regions.