Cleveland, OH Has Lost Over Half Its Population Since 1950

2023-03-30

In 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. inhabitants grew by simply 0.1%, the smallest development within the nation’s historical past. Inhabitants development rebounded solely barely in 2022, rising by 0.4%. Whereas specialists level to COVID-19 as a serious motive for such traditionally low development figures, the final two years are merely a continuation of a pattern that has lasted for many years.

Lengthy gone are the years of booming development, just like the Nineteen Fifties, when the inhabitants elevated near 2% yearly. Outdoors of a small surge within the Nineteen Nineties, inhabitants development has been slowing ever since. And the nationwide decline in inhabitants development has been accompanied by one other pattern: the lack of tens of hundreds, typically lots of of hundreds, of residents each decade in among the nation’s largest cities.

There are, in truth, a number of cities that have been as soon as among the many nation’s largest metropolises and have turn out to be shadows of their former selves, due largely to job losses and demographic shifts.

One such metropolis is Cleveland, Ohio. Now residence to 367,991 folks, Cleveland’s inhabitants declined by 546,817, or 59.8%, since 1950, when its inhabitants totaled 914,808. Over that interval, the town went from the seventh most populous in the US to the 54th.

Since 1950, the last decade that noticed the most important drop within the metropolis’s inhabitants was the Seventies, when the variety of folks residing there fell by 177,081, or 23.6%.