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Aging into our future: Projecting population age structures

The United States is growing both in size and age, as shown in our recently released population projections for each decade till 2040. My last post was more about the growth in population across the states and identifying commonalities over the projected time horizon. But as we focus our lens on the future, no matter how we examine […]

National population projections: Growing but slowing

Our new population projections over 2020, 2030, and 2040 for the nation as well as the 50 states and District of Columbia were released today. Looking forward, the U.S. population is expected to reach 383 million by 2040, but the rate of growth is projected to slow down from nearly 10% over the 2000-2010 decade to 6% between […]

How is New York City growing if it’s constantly losing people?

Year after year, some of the nation’s most dynamic cities are also the nation’s biggest losers when it comes to migrants. Yet rather than waste away, they continue to boom. This widely misunderstood paradox leads to some interesting articles every time the Census Bureau releases a new round of county population and migration estimates.New York […]

Why are Black households wealthier in Virginia?

Black households earn more in mid-Atlantic states, particularly in Virginia, than in any other state where Blacks make up a substantial portion of the population. As the previous post noted, neither the region’s overall wealth nor the concentration of federal government jobs in mid-Atlantic states fully accounts for why higher income Black households are disproportionately […]

How to modify poverty calculations for college towns

In our latest Census Brief, Poverty and postsecondary students in college towns, we discuss why it’s important for college towns to take undergraduate and graduate students into account when looking at community poverty. While poverty estimates explicitly exclude people living in group housing—such as dorms, correctional facilities, or residential nursing homes—these calculations do include college […]

The geography of Virginia’s presidential primary

Hillary Clinton won a majority in the Virginia Democratic primary on March 1st, while Donald Trump took a plurality of voters in the Republican primary. The Republican primary generated record voter turnout. Nearly 4 times as many votes were cast in the 2016 Republican primary as in the 2012 primary.Below are a series of maps […]

Population growth in Virginia is reversing decades-old trend, estimates show

Loudoun County, in Northern Virginia’s outer suburbs, was Virginia’s fastest growing locality in the 1990s and 2000s, nearly doubling its population each decade. Population growth in Loudoun, as in much of Virginia during the two decades was fueled by people moving out to newly built subdivisions on the edges of the commonwealth’s largest metro areas. […]

Density: three Virginias

Here is a fun map showing the distribution of people across Virginia by the density of their census tract. Each color represents one third of the total population. For the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to them as the “densest third,” the “middle third,” and the “sparsest third.” I’m tempted to call them the “urban […]

The decline of families could mean a change in housing demand

When George Murdock introduced the phrase “nuclear family,” (meaning a married couple with children) into the American lexicon during the 1950s, nuclear families made up the majority of U.S. households. But in the decades since the 1950s, nuclear families’ dominance has gradually slipped. Today, nuclear families make up less than a quarter of all households, […]