County Level Population Change

From Slow Boring which observes that: "almost all of West Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are losing people." It also notes that: "Fully 47% of counties lost population between July 2021 and July 2022."

A one year map with the rebound from the pandemic isn't a perfect gauge, however. A ten year map avoids static and random variation, as well as the one time shock of COVID-19:

What seems significant also looks different looking at changes in numbers of people per county rather than percentages:

As noted here:

Rural areas in the United States, often referred to as rural America, consists of approximately 97% of the United States' land area. An estimated 60 million people, or one in five residents (17.9% of the total U.S. population), live in rural America.

The post then muses about the divide, closely related to this population trends, between places where the market price of homes is above or below replacement value:

Here’s a 2,700-square-foot two-story home sitting on a 5,600-square-foot lot not far from the Clarendon Metro Station, but just far enough that the area is strict single-family zoning. It’s a nice house, but the $1.7 million price is mostly due to the expensive land. Absent that zoning rule, you might redevelop a parcel like that as a six-story building featuring ten 2,000-square-foot units (two on each floor) plus a 4,000-square-foot penthouse. The total value of the whole parcel would be much larger, but the individual units might be 50% of the price of the old house at 75% of the size. That redevelopment is possible because $1.7 million is so much higher than the replacement value of the house — regulation ensures that the price of housing is dominated by the price of land.

In a scenario of population decline, though, the market value of a house falls below the replacement value of the structures. You can see this by looking at statistics, but it’s pretty easy to eyeball where it’s taking place because the signature is a neighborhood with more vacant lots or vacant buildings than ongoing construction projects. Huge swathes of Detroit are, infamously, like this. But it’s also true of Cleveland and St. Louis and Milwaukee and Baltimore and other cities. Abandoned or vacant buildings are a source of blight — negative amenity value to the neighborhood. And each city with a significant amount of vacant property has its own policy apparatus for dealing with it and its own local discourse about the merits of that apparatus and whether the problem should be handled some other way. In years of reading about this, though, I’ve never heard of a city that has a magic formula to deal with vacant lots and blight. What I have seen is the vacant building problem vanish in my own neighborhood in D.C. due to robust market demand for housing. I’ve also seen in Chicago that a city can be capacious enough to support a lot of construction activity in the West Loop, even while significant swathes of the South Side look a lot like Cleveland.

Generally speaking, counties with declining populations tend to lean Republican and counties that are growing, even a little, tend to lean Democratic, although there are exceptions, driven by race, religion, age, education, and the relative importance of fossil fuels and tourism in the local economy.