{"id":133,"date":"2019-02-01T13:44:49","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T13:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/?p=133"},"modified":"2019-02-01T13:54:05","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T13:54:05","slug":"d-c-s-population-growth-has-seriously-slowed-down-what-gives-dcist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/133\/","title":{"rendered":"D.C.’s Population Growth Has Seriously Slowed Down. What Gives? | DCist"},"content":{"rendered":"

dcist.com\/story\/19\/01\/31\/d-c-s-population-growth-has-seriously-slowed-down-what-gives\/<\/a>
\nD.C.\u2019s Population Growth Has Seriously Slowed Down. What Gives? It has long been a favorite talking point for D.C.\u2019s elected officials: 1,000 new people moving into the city every month, making it one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the country.
\nBut what was once a rapid and enviable clip of population growth in the nation\u2019s capital has slowed somewhat in recent years, so much so that 2017 to 2018 represented the slowest year of growth in a decade.
\nBecome a sponsor? That\u2019s according to a December analysis of new Census numbers by the D.C. Chief Financial Officer. According to those numbers, D.C.\u2019s population in July 2018 was 702,455, an increase of 6,764 people over the year prior. That represents the 13th straight year of population growth; since 2005, the city\u2019s population has jumped by 135,319 people.
\nWhile overall growth numbers still provide enough to boast about\u2014the last time D.C. had more than 700,000 residents was in 1975\u2014the growth from 2017 to 2018 was roughly half of the average from 2008 to 2018, when a few more than 12,000 people were added to the city\u2019s rolls annually.
\nBreaking it down further, the CFO\u2019s analysis found that while that 10-year period saw an average of 3,581 people added annually to the city\u2019s population from other parts of the U.S., from 2017 to 2018 close to 1,000 people actually left the city for other parts of the country. (The other elements of population change\u2014natural increases, or births minus deaths, and international migration have stayed somewhat steady over the years.)
\nSo what gives? Are D.C.\u2019s high housing costs dissuading people from moving to the city or the region? Is it crime, or schools? Is it something less tangible, like people staying away from the nation\u2019s capital because of the state of the country\u2019s politics?
\n This graph shows the year-to-year change in D.C.\u2019s population growth. People steadily moved into the city from 2006 to 2013, but since then the number of people coming in has declined from the year before it, save 2014 to 2015.Office of the D.C. Chief Financial Officer \u201cWe were growing at a very fast clip, and we all expected some leveling of that growth,\u201d said Mayor Muriel Bowser when asked about the slowing growth this week.
\nDemographers and population experts say she is somewhat right: That the city\u2019s population growth has slowed is to be expected, especially since the overall national economy has been humming along recently.
\n\u201cWhen the national economy is doing well, we typically have a larger outflow of residents. If there are more opportunities for you with a lower cost of living, more people are more likely to take that up. People tend to retire at greater rates during good economic times as well, and they often leave the Washington region because it\u2019s a high-cost area,\u201d said Jeanette Chapman, deputy director at The Stephen S. Fuller Institute at George Mason University.
\nChapman says that the Washington region is \u201ca little countercyclical.\u201d That means when recessions hit, more people are attracted to D.C. and the surrounding jurisdictions because of the steadier offerings of jobs. But when the national economy picks up, the opposite happens: People leave.
\nThe Census data crunched by the CFO shows as much. D.C.\u2019s population started ticking up in 2007, and jumped somewhat dramatically from 2008 to 2009 \u2014 the height of the Great Recession \u2014 growing steadily through until 2013. After that, the population growth has continued, but each year being a little slower than the one before it, save 2014 to 2015.
\nChapman says that D.C.\u2019s slowing growth is part of a regional trend \u2014 but that the city is losing people a little more slowly than the region as a whole.
\n\u201cThe return to cities and the amenity-based improvements, the schools\u2019 improvements, the crime improvement, all of those have factored into a little bit more growth potential for the District proper, which we\u2019ve seen, so that growth lasted longer in the District compared to the rest of the region,\u201d she said.
\nWhile the state of the national economy has an important role to play in the pace that the Washington region\u2019s population grows, the cost of living in and around D.C. is also an important factor.
\n\u201cI think housing costs, and the increasing housing cost particularly in very desirable neighborhoods and certain communities, clearly is a challenge for those jurisdictions and for our region. People do have to make that decision, that tradeoff,\u201d said Paul DesJardin, the director of Community Planning Services at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
\n\u201cYou hear anecdotes all the time of people making the tradeoff: \u2018I\u2019m well-educated, but this is just going to be too expensive, too hard of a place to try to make it,\u2019\u201d he said.
\nThat\u2019s ultimately what drove the decision for Nick Darby, a 24-year-old statistician who was offered two comparable jobs right out of grad school in two very different places.
\n\u201cMy options were go to D.C. or go to Columbus, [Ohio]. The money was about the same, and I didn\u2019t want to be living in D.C. trying to pay D.C. housing prices,\u201d he said. \u201cHousing near everything in D.C. is crazy. But I\u2019ve got a two-bedroom apartment that I\u2019m renting for myself [in Columbus] for $1,000, and that\u2019s pretty great.\u201d
\nIn 2015, an analysis by D.C.\u2019s CFO found that while people who moved to the city during the 2000-2014 timeframe most often cited jobs as they reason, the ones who left during that same period said housing and housing costs were the reason why.
\nChapman says that while the Washington region has consistently attracted young residents and then lost some of them as they started families, things like the region\u2019s increasing cost of living has prompted some changes in those patterns.
\n\u201cThere are some warning signs with our millennial cohort. We\u2019re not retaining them to the same degree at a regional level that we used to,\u201d she said.
\nDesJardin says that the increasing cost of housing\u2014and the lag in building enough to keep pace with expected job growth in the region \u2014 is an issue that local jurisdictions are now taking up. A COG analysis last September said the region would have to build 100,000 more housing units than currently planned by 2045 to keep up with the jobs expected to come..
\nAll told, says Chapman, while population growth has slowed regionally in recent years, it\u2019s not a doom-and-gloom scenario. It\u2019s just part of a cycle.
\n\u201cForecasts are very often presented as a straight line, because we don\u2019t want to create more angst about forecasts than is necessary. In reality, things do not move in a straight line. There are cycles to these patterns, and there will continue to be cycles to these patterns,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cThe long-term growth trajectory of the District\u2019s population is still positive. There may be ebbs and flows to the degree to which it\u2019s growing, that\u2019s natural, but in the long term it\u2019s still growing,\u201d she added.
\nThe era of the 1,000-new-residents-a-month may be over, but D.C. is expected to keep adding people for the foreseeable future. And the one thing that is likely to ensure that is international migration, which includes both non-citizens coming from other countries and U.S. citizens repatriating after a stint abroad.
\n\u201cThe international immigration, both in the District and the region, even in the face of high housing costs, continues fairly strong. And as a percentage it\u2019s actually been very steady,\u201d said DesJardin.. \u201cWere it not for the international immigration, we actually would have had jurisdictions that would have experienced population loss.\u201d
\nThis story originally appeared on WAMU.<\/p>\n

Mary Bolton 202-390-1208<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

dcist.com\/story\/19\/01\/31\/d-c-s-population-growth-has-seriously-slowed-down-what-gives\/ D.C.\u2019s Population Growth Has Seriously Slowed Down. What Gives? It has long been a favorite talking point for D.C.\u2019s elected officials: 1,000 new people moving into the city every month, making it one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the country. But what was once a rapid and enviable clip of population growth in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-housingarchive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dcfeedback.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}