A modest rebound of U.S. cities from the pandemic’s worst effects continued from 2022 to 2023 as many large cities added to their populations, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Though some cities that lost residents during the pandemic haven’t surpassed their pre-pandemic numbers, fewer posted population declines than in 2020-2021, another possible sign of progress.
“More cities are either growing faster, flipped from declines to gains or had less decline,” Frey told The Washington Post. “For many of these cities, they’re doing better. They’re not where they were before the pandemic.”
Meanwhile, the South continued to lead population growth nationwide. Overall U.S. population growth also accelerated, with metropolitan areas growing slightly faster than rural America, said Steven Martin, a demographer with the Urban Institute who reviewed the census data. Those areas included D.C. and Boston.
The census period examined July 2022 to July 2023.
Notably, Detroit recorded population growth for the first time in close to seven decades, reaching more than 633,000 residents. The city added people for the first time since 1957, according to the Detroit mayor’s office.
“When I was campaigning, I opened my speeches by saying the population of Detroit has declined every year I’ve been alive,” Mayor Mike Duggan (D), who was born in 1958, told The Post. “Now, nobody can say that, and that’s a great feeling.”
Cities with 250,000 people or more whose populations were hit hard by the pandemic but have shown new growth include Atlanta, Minneapolis, D.C. and Raleigh, N.C. On average, cities of 50,000 or more showed growth in the Northeast and Midwest, reversing declines in 2022, the Census Bureau reported.
San Francisco also saw a minor gain of about 1,200 people after an exodus during the pandemic. Overall, the Bay Area’s population decline was far smaller from 2022 to 2023 than it was earlier in the pandemic, Martin said. Some other metro areas saw a similar pattern, including the greater New York area.
“You’ve got these [areas] that are still behind national growth or even still slightly losing population, but where it looks like the population hemorrhaging in the immediate aftermath of the covid epidemic has ceased,” Martin said.
Some cities whose populations didn’t drop during the 2020-2021 census period had even greater growth from 2022 to 2023, including San Antonio and Fort Worth, which topped the list of cities with the biggest population gains.
Cities in the South dominated that list, including Charlotte and Jacksonville, Fla. D.C. gained for the second year in a row, adding about 8,000 people, posting its highest growth rate increase since 2017, according to Frey’s analysis.
“When the pandemic hit, people were saying that’s the end of cities,” Frey said. “These numbers show that there’s some positive news and perhaps things are moving back more toward normal.”
The 15 largest U.S. cities remained the same, though Jacksonville and Fort Worth moved up the list. Leading the country in population are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.
Though overall trends are positive, some metro areas are lagging behind, including Los Angeles and other parts of California; New Orleans, Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana; and a swath that includes Buffalo and Pittsburgh, according to Martin’s analysis.
An ongoing growth trend continued in the South, where cities grew an average of 1 percent, compared with 0.1 or 0.2 percent in the rest of the country.
“While the nation’s fastest-growing cities continue to be in Sun Belt states, the 2023 population estimates show that some of the top gainers are now on the outskirts of metropolitan areas or in rural areas,” said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s population division.
Texas cities made up eight of the 15 fastest-growing cities with a population of 20,000 or more.
Topping the list were Celina, Fulshear and Princeton, which all grew by more than 20 percent. Celina, a town in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, grew by 26 percent, reaching a population of more than 43,000, according to the data. Most of the fastest-growing cities had populations below 50,000, the census found.
Texas’s population has been growing steadily over the past decade, though it slowed during the pandemic. In 2023, the numbers of both immigrants and domestic residents moving to the state picked up dramatically, and birthrates have also ticked up, said Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer.
International migration has accounted for growth in Houston and Dallas. In suburban areas around the state’s urban cores, domestic migration is largely fueling growth as people move in from California, New York, Illinois, Florida and other states, Potter said.
“When those people are moving here, they’re landing in these suburban ring counties,” he said. “Those are the areas that are growing a lot.”
