Populations in many large cities in the Midwest rebounded and even began to grow in 2023 reversing years of population declines, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Cities in the Northeast with populations of 50,000 or more grew in 2023 by an average of .2% and those in the Midwest grew by about .1% after declining the year before, according to the Census.
But while cities in the Midwest on average did rebound, the data show that the trend over the past three years for some large Northeast Ohio cities including Cleveland and Akron continues downward.
The Census report suggests that while these cities are shrinking, it’s at a much slower rate than in recent history, said Mark Salling, a demographer at Cleveland State University.
“It has tapered off in Cleveland — the losses — quite significantly, so it’s a pretty stable population in Cleveland right now,” Salling said. “The losses are not as severe as they were a decade, two decades or three decades ago.”
Cleveland’s population declined 2.74% and Akron’s population went down 0.91% between 2020 and 2023. Between 2010 and 2020, Cleveland lost 6% of its population and Akron 4%.
In the 1990s, the rate of population loss was 5.4%, according to the Cleveland Planning Commission. In the 1980s it was 8.9%.
Cleveland is not the only Rust Belt city to experience this decline. Between the 1970s and the 2010s, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh "each lost more than 40% of their populations," according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
The stability reflected in the new Census figures masks an uneven change in population across Cleveland as more people move in or near Downtown and the southeast neighborhoods have seen continued declines, Salling said.
He said migration, especially when people move to suburbs, is the biggest reason for population loss in the cities.
“If you build new housing out in Geauga County or Lorain County or some of the other adjacent counties or even some of the more distant counties,” Salling said, “there’s a chain of migration of population that takes place to fill in the housing, the new construction that’s further and further away from the central cities.”
The Census report shows small population increases in bordering Lorain, Medina and Portage counties between 2020 and 2023.
Conceptually, the solution to increasing a city’s population is simple, Salling said: jobs and industry that would bring people to Cleveland from other parts of the country.
“If you don’t have people moving in for jobs from elsewhere,” he said, “and you’ve got housing construction taking place further away, people move out toward that new housing.”
Salling also said local governments should be finding ways to attract immigrants to move to the region.
“Cleveland and the state should be, and I think to some extent are, saying, ‘Come on up here. Come on to Ohio. Come on to Cleveland,” Salling said. “I don’t care where they come from. Migrants build the economy. It’s been shown in many, many studies. You wouldn’t find a study out there that is credible that says migration hurts an economy.”
Other Ohio cities also saw slight population declines between 2020 and 2023, including Canton, down 3%, Dayton and Youngstown, down less than 2% and Toledo, down less than 3%, while Cincinnati and Columbus both showed less than 1% increases over the same period.
Overall, Ohio lost about 0.11% of its population over the three-year period.
