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It's Official: Columbia Population Goes Over 100,000
The Census Bureau has released new population estimates for 2008 for sub-county geographic areas. Among the interesting facts that can be gleaned from the new data:
- The city of Columbia, MO grew by almost 1,800 people (1.8%) in the year ending July 1, 2008 resulting in a new official estimate of 100,733. Columbia has been experiencing consistent growth over the decade, averaging just under 2,000 new people per year since the 2000 census. It joins Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield and Independence as one of five Missouri cities with over 100,000 population. Lee's Summit, with a new current estimate of 84,208 and with growth of 13,490 since 2000 is the next closest to crossing this threshold.
- Other cities in the state showing significant growth in the latest year were O'Fallon (+1952, 2.6%) and Wentzville (+1358, 6.1%) in St. Charles county, Springfield and Lee's Summit, both with gains of about 1500. Pevely showed a surprising and dramatic increase of 1233 persons. That took Pevely's population to 5808 and was a 27% increase making it the
top growth city in the state based on percentage increase.
- Only seven cities in the state are estimated to have lost at least 100 people in the latest year. One of these is the City of St. Louis, which probably doesn't count since they traditionally are under-estimated by the Bureau and have to challenge the estimate each year. So their iniital estimate showing a loss of 1300 people will probably be turned into an increase of several thousand if they successfully challenge again (see our web page documenting how this has worked for the past five years). The other six population losers were all in St. Louis County: Florissant was the biggest loser with -274, followed by University City (-196), Chesterfield (-132), Webster Groves (-122), Ferguson (-119) and Maryland Heights (-117).
- Nationwide, New York City had the largest numeric increase during the year with 53,498 new residents (.6%), while four Texas cities (Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Austin) all posted gains of over 18,000 to rank in the top 10. New Orleans showed the largest percentage increase of cities over 200,000 at 8.2% as victims of Katrina continued to return (the increase was almost 29,000 last year and just under 24,000 this year so the pace slowed a little); but the 2008 estimate of 311,853 is still almost 36% less than what it was in 2000 (484,674).
- Among larger cities (200,000 or more) Cleveland and Detroit had the largest declines in population. Detroit has the greatest numeric decrease, losing another 4,874 persons, while Cleveland was second with a decline of 4,265. But since Detroit is roughly twice as large as Cleveland, the Ohio city would seem to merit the distinction of being the largest loser of the year.
View these numbers and more in a series of Top 50/Bottom 50 reports for
Missouri only
| United States
To access the data along with a press release visit the Census Bureau web page . If you are not familiar with the Bureau's program for allowing cities to challenge their estimates you should be sure to visit the Estimates Challenges web page (which is linked to from the above-referenced cities page). Missouri data followers will be particularly interested in the successful challenges of the 2007 estimates for St. Louis City, Kansas City and St. Joseph. This is a first for Kansas City and St. Joesph, but is old hat for St. Louis. The Kansas City adjustment was over 25,000 which is more than five times as much as the adjustments for the other two Missouri cities. The challenge was not accepted until January 29 of this year and as a result it is not reflected in these latest estimates (which include revised values of the estimates for each year since the 2000 census). The higher numbers for St. Louis and St. Joseph are refelcted in the July 1 , 2007 estimate figures for those 2 cities. The MCDC has downloaded the data table shown on the Challenges page and created a data set that can be accessed via Uexplore/Dexter in our public archive. The dataset is named challenges2007.sas7bdat.
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