Official US 2010 Census Results

[Linus Van Pelt]

Cook shrinks a bit, older inner suburbs grow slightly, outer suburbs grow a lot (Kendall county more than doubled!), and the rest of the state looks like Iowa (cities grow a bit while rural counties shrink).

Not massively to the advantage of one party or another, since each party's strongest base area is shrinking.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Just to add on to Verily and Cinyc's comments, another issue is that areas can often decrease in population when they become gentrified and "hip". The reason is that upper-middle class people, especially those without kids who predominate in such areas, use more square feet per person than low-income people, especially minority families. If a bunch of minority families with kids are leaving an area while childless professionals who like to take up their own apartment or live just with one or two roommates are entering, the number of people per existing residential unit will likely decline. But the fluffier sections of the newspaper will include a lot of articles suggesting that "people" are moving in to the area because the journalists and intended readers know more of the people moving in than out, and it intuitively seems to the new middle class residents that they're living densely, because they are, in fact, living more densely than the white suburbanites they compare themselves to.

This can be offset sometimes if the total number of occupied residential spaces is increasing, either because there was a lot of vacant blight to start with, or because industrial spaces are converted into condos.

We'll have to see when the block results come out, but I suspect we'll find certain areas where this process is at its strongest, like the border areas between white brownstone Brooklyn and Bed Stuy/Crown Heights or the areas moving from Hispanic to liberal middle-class white in northwest Chicago, are either shrinking or at least increasing much less quickly than one might think.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Question for the northwesterners: why is Deschutes county (Bend, OR) growing so fast?

[Linus Van Pelt]

Delaware and (more interestingly) North Carolina shipped today.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Nice work, Sheilak5! I was wondering whether someone would work on a map like that.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Wisconsin seems to be holding people rather better than similar areas in neighbouring states, both comparing the rural southwest to rural Iowa and Illinois, and Milwaukee to other Great Lakes industrial cities.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Wisconsin seems to be holding people rather better than similar areas in neighbouring states, both comparing the rural southwest to rural Iowa and Illinois, and Milwaukee to other Great Lakes industrial cities.

Milwaukee lost a little bit of its population, but, yes, it was no Cleveland.   Of the Great Lakes states, Wisconsin might be the least dependent on manufacturing - that's my sense of the state, though I don't know if there's data to actually back up my impression.

Actually Wisconsin is second in the nation by % of adults employed in manufacturing. But Milwaukee's flagship industry is less vulnerable to the replacement of workers by machines because, well, it is the replacement of workers by machines.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Something quite weird happened with the city of Atlanta - the estimated growth for the decade is so wildly off it makes me wonder: was there a secession to form a new municipality in the last couple of years?

2000 census - 416,474

2001 estimate - 430,684
2002 estimate - 442,538
2003 estimate - 456,919
2004 estimate - 468,725
2005 estimate - 483,108
2006 estimate - 498,496
2007 estimate - 520,368
2008 estimate - 537,958

2010 census - 420,003

[Linus Van Pelt]

The upstate's holding OK, all things considered, except for Western New York. Even Monroe and Onondaga grew. As we saw with Wisconsin, the severe losses are really just in the core rust belt extending from the southern tip of Lake Michigan to the eastern tip of Lake Erie, rather than the broader industrial midwest.

(There are also major losses in agricultural areas all around, but that's a separate issue).

[Linus Van Pelt]

Question: what's up with South Richmond Hill, in Queens? Several tracts are around 20% multiracial and every tract in the neighborhood is at least 10% or so.

Richmond Hill has a large Indo-Caribbean community (Guyanese, Trinidadians etc.), so it's likely people with South Asian/Black ancestry.

[Linus Van Pelt]

What's with a 70% Asian tract in Lafayette Indiana?

Purdue - Cinyc mentioned this earlier.

These single Asian census tracts on otherwise white campuses in the middle of the country are grad student housing - no midwestern state university has anything even close to an Asian-plurality undergraduate student body, but graduate housing is often very Asian since there are a lot of international students from Asia in the more technical programs who live in university housing since they don't know the local rental scene while the other grad students mostly live off-campus.

There's a 28% Asian tract in Southeast Iowa that has almost 13,000% growth over 2000

This is Maharishi Vedic City, actual name of an actual municipality that incorporated in 2001. Check it out on Wikipedia - it's super weird.

[Linus Van Pelt]

The City of Portland no longer has any tracts that aren't white-plurality. The four adjacent Black tracts from 2000 in northeast Portland have undergone major gentrification and are now 53-27, 56-25, 52-27 and 56-26 white.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I guess I never knew this part of the background to this whole Lou Barletta thing, but Hazleton PA had an incredibly high influx of Hispanics over the decade, way more than the other ex-coal towns in the region - the % Hispanic for the city went from 5% in 2000 to 37% in 2010 and on the NY Times map the Hispanic increases for all the tracts within the city are 858%, 1,347%, 1,779%, 1,062%, 374%, 685%, 344% and 1043%. Does anyone know why this is?

[Linus Van Pelt]

A note of caution about these: the Census Bureau doesn't actually calculate births, deaths and migration for municipalities as it does for counties and states. Rather, the subcounty estimates are developed by distributing the county growth based on the number of housing units in each jurisdiction. For this reason they can run into trouble in areas where population change doesn't involve construction or demolition of housing. In particular in 2010 the local estimates appeared to underestimate population decline in some poor inner-city areas where vacancy rates increased significantly.