ConcourseZ wrote:PITfall wrote:https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/allegheny-county-gains-population-for-first-time-in-six-decades-says-census/Content?oid=20001909&media=AMP+HTML
Allegheny County posts population growth.
Yes! A 2.2% population growth is great news. The city had a negligible drop. Likely, deaths outpacing the influx of new people. That will change. But that 10-year number doesn't reflect the year-over-year improvement.
Butler and Washington counties had nice gains.
Allegheny County basically kept pace with overall Pennsylvania growth.
Population declines start slowly then end dramatically. It takes decades.
Population growth starts small then ramps up. This also takes decades.
It will take a while for the 80s bust to be recovered. But it's happening.
Interesting to note that high-tax, many regulations, expensive NYC added 1.1 million people to its population.
-Outside of Pittsburgh, Greater Philadelphia, Harrisburg, the ABE region, and York County, population growth in Pennsylvania was either basically flat or negative. Erie, Newcastle, and Johnstown shrank, as did Youngstown just across the border.
-Pennsylvania slightly outperformed it's peer states of Ohio and Michigan. Pittsburgh overperformed Cleveland ever so slightly, but underperformed compared to Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
-The most successful state in the entire Great Lakes Region in the past 40 years is Minnesota. It is high tax, high service, and spends a lot on education (but has lower rates of corruption than the rest of the Midwest; for example the MSP region never had a mob family in it). MN posted a 7.6% growth rate. Make of that what you will. The fastest growing largeish metro in the region is Columbus, which posted a 12.5% growth rate. Lets just say that I think the MSP and CMH regions set the bar for what I think is possible in Pittsburgh.
-Expecting the region to ever grow at the insane growth rates of an RDU/AUS or an ATL/PHX is probably not realistic. Dealing with the problems that sort of growth rate comes with is also not fun-horrific traffic, overcrowded schools, power and water shortages, and increasingly expensive/scarce housing (example: My brother's house in the CLT metro area has somehow appreciated $100k per year since he bought it, another friend in a different sunbelt metro pocketed $175k in the timespan of just one year on his house).
-I can almost see the big Sun Belt markets peaking from where we are now driven by the dying off of the baby boomers, infrastructure limits, resource limits, increasing costs of living, and the effects of global warming. See Los Angeles as an example of where I think Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, etc are eventually heading. LA was the giant boomtown of the 60s-90s. LA County only grew by a mere 2% last decade; it finally choked on it's sprawl and starved itself of affordable housing. The cities of Midwest/Great Lakes with it's abundant water and power, more temperate climate, cheap cost of living, and solid amenities; having largely digested the pain of post-industrial decline are really well situated to take advantage of what is to come in a way that I don't think New England and the West Coast are.
