The (Kinda Sorta) Comeback of the Midsize Metro Area
Population trends have shifted ever so slightly in the direction of metropolitan areas with fewer than a million people.
Here’s lookin’ at you, Des Moines.
Photographer: David Greedy/Getty Images
For the first time since 2007, America’s midsize metropolitan areas (population 250,000 to 999,000) grew faster than the large ones in the 12 months ending July 1, 2018 — 0.8 percent to 0.7 percent. That fun fact, culled by Indeed chief economist Jed Kolko from the new population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week, was a tantalizing hint that maybe the tables are finally turning and growth shifting to the country’s smaller cities.
Or maybe not. What stood out as soon as I started looking through the metropolitan-area population numbers is that while the three biggest metropolitan areas — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — have gone from growing slowly to actually losing population, most of the rest of the country’s large metropolitan areas are plowing right ahead.