All US Cities Which Used to Have More Than 100,000 People But Don’t Anymore
Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century.
The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis as two other cities whose population has dropped during that same time period. Detroit went from 1.85 million in 1950 to 639,000 in 2020 and St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 300,000 over the same time period:
St. Louis was once the country’s 4th largest city. Worlds Fair and Olympics in 1904. Two Major League Baseball teams. It didn’t boom as much as the Great Lakes cities in between the wars and it declined just as much after.
Comments 2
This is an interesting thread, but that point about Detroit and St. Louis misses the extent to which Detroit’s and St. Louis’s population losses reflected suburban flight rather than people leaving the regions altogether.
Metro Detroit had about 4.48 million residents in 1990 and still has more than 4.4 million today, making it the country’s 14th-largest metropolitan area. The St. Louis metro area had about 2.56 million residents in 1990 and has roughly 2.8 million today, ranking around 23rd.
For both regions, the more accurate story is decades of stagnation combined with a dramatic shift from the central city to the suburbs. Detroit is now experiencing a meaningful urban revival. St. Louis is not.
I say that as a St. Louis resident with an interest (as an amateur) of the region’s development history, including that I wish we would learn from Detroit and others. St. Louis remains a vibrant metropolitan area, but we’ve done the entire metro-area a disservice by continuing practices that make the City languish.
It began with the City-County split in 1876 and continues today: St. Louis County has 80-plus separate municipalities. Add state leadership that equates downtown and Black communities with crime, including taking control of the St. Louis City Police Department despite falling crime. All of this means it's become extraordinarily difficult to develop cohesive metro area leadership. St. Louis’s problem is not that the metropolitan area disappeared. It’s that we’ve spent nearly 150 years dividing it against itself.
{this doesn't even begin to take into account histories of inequitable land use policies, mishandling development priorities, education funding tied to local property tax revenues, etc. that contribute to the current state}
Somerville, MA is a similar story, with a twist. Much of the manufacturing left Somerville, and neighboring Cambridge, followed by the suburban flight of both residents and nascent tech companies. In the past 30 years, the next generations of upper middle class college grads started swarming back, thanks to the extension of the MBTA Red Line and the rebirth of Cambridge and downtown Boston as high tech and pharma hubs.
You would think this would lead to a population increase, however the money involved led to a mass renovation of the existing stock of ubiquitous triple decker Victorian houses, which traditionally housed 3-4 distinct households, into single family and duplex condo housing.
Same amount of land, far fewer housing options.
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