Same old story… U.S. is getting older and more diverse
This is my third and final blog post about the Census Bureau’s special report on Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010. My first two posts covered information from...
View ArticleVirginia’s 2013 Metro Areas
Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) or Metro Areas are perhaps the most common way to define an urban region. Because many urban areas cross into multiple localities, such as in Hampton Roads, MSAs...
View ArticleMetropolitan Cross-Sections: College Graduates
With input from Hamilton, I’ve been looking recently at how metropolitan areas change as one travels from the center to the periphery. The following charts show the percent of the population 25 and...
View ArticleThe Line that Divides DC
No it’s not a party line. It’s an almost perfectly straight line running north-south along 16th Street, passing through the White House, and then continuing along the Potomac River to the south. It...
View ArticleAverage Density of Virginia’s Metro Areas
Recently, I’ve been comparing a number of traits of metropolitan areas based on distance from the core. Here I’m looking at the average densities of each metro area as you travel outwards from the...
View ArticleA funny thing is happening in many US cities
An article at the Urbanophile gives us a helpful graphic explaining the old and new “Donut” conceptions of the city. In the “Old Donut,” we have an impoverished central city with a ring of thriving...
View ArticleAre the “urban millennials” a real thing?
There has been quite a bit of hype around the idea that millennials are gravitating towards city centers. Canadian professor Markus Moos calls it “youthification” and has recently put together some...
View ArticleEven more evidence for the new donut
A while back, I wrote a post on the transformation of US cities over the last two decades, using Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta, and Denver as examples. That investigation, using graphs to show changes in...
View ArticleMigration data miscounts millennials, confuses the media
Fivethirtyeight’s Ben Casselman published an article recently entitled “Think Millennials Prefer the City? Think Again.” He cites the most recently published migration data from the Census Bureau’s CPS...
View ArticleMapping city to city migration
The Census Bureau recently released new migration data based on the 2009-2013 5-year American Community Survey estimates. This data estimates how many people move between each of the country’s...
View ArticleCould the “two-body problem” be contributing to rural brain drain?
More career women means more two-career couplesOne of the biggest economic stories of the last half-century has been the growing participation of women in the workforce. And it’s not just the number of...
View Article10 ways to map Northern Virginia
“As though the New Jersey suburbs were grafted onto South Carolina” is how Robert Lang of Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute described Northern Virginia. Of course that’s a bit of a hyperbole. Even...
View ArticleIt’s a hard knock life: School test scores closely follow local income levels
When people begin house hunting, one of the most common criteria they consider is the quality of the local school district, not just for the sake of their children but also because schools often...
View ArticleDensity: three Virginias
Here is a fun map showing the distribution of people across Virginia by the density of their census tract. Each color represents one third of the total population. For the purposes of this post, I’ll...
View ArticleBlack households earn more in the Mid-Atlantic, but there is no simple...
One of the most persistent statistics in American demography has been the gap that exists between Black Americans’ incomes and the rest of the population. But among those who identified themselves as...
View ArticleThe metropolitanization of rural America
One of the predominant long-term trends in American demography has been the steady rise in the portion of the population that lives in cities or nearby them. The percentage of the U.S. population...
View ArticleThe post-recession shape of American cities
Since the Changing Shape of American Cities report came out, I’ve fielded numerous questions about whether the trends cited had much to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and the recession that...
View ArticleOut-migration from Virginia continues for a third year, slowing statewide...
In December, the Census Bureau released its annual state population estimates, which showed that Virginia grew by 44,000 residents last year, its smallest numerical gain in population since the 1970s....
View ArticleVirginia’s population is growing at its slowest pace since the 1920s
This morning the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia released its 2016 population estimates for Virginia’s counties and cities. The most obvious trend in the population estimates is how...
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