Philadelphia gains, Pittsburgh shrinks in population

By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
Posted 35m ago |

Pennsylvania's two biggest cities moved in opposite directions in the past decade: Philadelphia gained population for the first time in 60 years while Pittsburgh lost people, according to Census data released Wednesday.

Overall, Pennsylvania grew by 3.4% to 12,702,379, driven by large gains in the Hispanic population and steady growth of the Asian population, says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. Hispanics account for 77% of the state's growth.

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Those increases and a 12.5% gain in the African-American population offset a 0.07% drop in the non-Hispanic white population.

The declining number of non-Hispanic white people is caused primarily by two things: a birth rate about half that of Hispanics and outmigration, says Gordon DeJong, professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University,

"If you're consistently losing 20-somethings, which we have been for the last 40 to 50 years … you also lose their kids," he says.

The City of Brotherly Love saw a 0.6% population increase to 1,526,006, the first such gain since the 1950 Census, Frey says.

"We are thrilled," Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter says. "I've been saying for some time that I think the city was not only moving in the right direction, but growing. Our slogan is 'Philly rising.' A lot of effort went into this."

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Pittsburgh's population fell by 8.6% to 305,704 — a sharper decline than some had expected, says Chris Briem, regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh. "I was expecting 309,000 to 310,00," he says. "That's probably tied to vacancy issues typical of a lot of urban cores, housing vacancy issues."

Briem says population declines in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania can be traced to the loss of steel-working and other manufacturing jobs three decades ago.

"We lost one-half of the manufacturing base in the early 1980s," he says. "It's who left that's very important. It tended to be the younger workers."

That left western Pennsylvania with one of the largest proportions of older residents in the nation, Briem says.

"We're an older region, so we've suffered from natural population declines over the last decade. We've had more deaths than births for the last 15 years," he says, but adds that some areas are rebounding. "We think a lot of the counties have hit rock bottom and have started to pick up, or at least the decline has abated."

DeJong notes that every county in eastern and southern Pennsylvania gained population, which he says is largely because of people moving from Maryland and New Jersey, drawn by lower property taxes.

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