Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

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twincitizen
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby twincitizen » September 22nd, 2021, 10:35 am

I wonder if Winona got wrecked by the census offically counting on April 1st, when college students had largely moved home due to the pandemic. Though, Bemidji appears to have been spared that fate, so I guess I don't know.
That was my first thought. Even though the Census count date is April 1 (barely two weeks into the pandemic from Minnesota's perspective), it would have been extra difficult to do any follow-up counts for people who hadn't completed theirs online prior to that date, due to so many students having moved away from campus by the time those follow-up attempts occurred. The college campus factor could also help explain why Minneapolis and St. Paul's (and Winona's) populations wound up a little lower than Met Council's forecast, but the metro and state as a whole met or exceeded forecasts.

I'm curious though if this college factor played out elsewhere. Would be interesting to see data from various-sized college towns around the country. Of course you have to weigh against other factors, like whether that particular town's non-college population was growing, stagnant, or shrinking. e.g. A rapidly growing town wouldn't show a net population loss due to poor census response from college kids, it would show up as less growth than expected. So I'm guessing Winona isn't growing as rapidly, as say, Mankato, which showed plenty of gain.

Now that I think about it, the option to complete the Census online probably saved it from being a total lost cause. It was so easy to fill out.
Strib has an article up looking at how empty dorm populations impacted Census counts. Important to note though that they only look at dormitory housing, not regular apartments in these towns, so there could be a lot of skewing on this variable. https://www.startribune.com/for-minneso ... fresh=true

uptownbro
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby uptownbro » March 24th, 2022, 7:41 am

https://m.startribune.com/population-de ... 600158882/

Very large declines in Ramsey and Hennepin county populations last year. 13000 for Hennepin alone

This was very common among larger metro areas last year from San Fran to NYC

Trademark
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby Trademark » March 24th, 2022, 7:48 am

https://m.startribune.com/population-de ... 600158882/

Very large declines in Ramsey and Hennepin county populations last year. 13000 for Hennepin alone

This was very common among larger metro areas last year from San Fran to NYC
I wonder where in Hennepin and Ramsey county the population is declining. (No strib account so it might have said it in there)

uptownbro
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby uptownbro » March 24th, 2022, 7:49 am

It did not. Much of it was attributed to covid closures of college campuses in both counties as well as early retirements. Crime in both counties was given as a possible reason but not the driving factor

Tyler
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby Tyler » March 24th, 2022, 8:55 am

Not way its true, IMO (unless its 100% driven by the campus counting situation, which would be stupid). But no chance the normal population decreased.
Towns!

phop
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby phop » March 24th, 2022, 9:02 am

Officials at the Metropolitan Council, the regional planning agency, say they are studying the new data, but they believe their own population estimates to be released in July will be higher.

"We think our population estimates will look different based on development trends," said Met Council Research Manager Joel Huting.

Huting said they look at housing counts and building permits in determining population estimates and 2020 was a strong year for development with more than 19,000 residential units added across the Twin Cities.
Will be interesting to compare.

uptownbro
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby uptownbro » March 24th, 2022, 9:07 am

I think compared to other large metro areas this isnt bad.
From the NYT:
"New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco lost a total of over 700,000 people from July 2020 to July 2021"
Sadly the comment section of the star tribune currently is and im sure FB soon will be feasting over this.

Also off topic (kinda) but Im finding much of the reporting here and everywhere overly pessimistic about cities. An example of this is when Seven downtown paused operations in January it got front page treatment while its re opening this week was covered by one outlet. Same with other business in uptown and downtown.
Last edited by uptownbro on March 24th, 2022, 9:15 am, edited 2 times in total.

thespeedmccool
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby thespeedmccool » March 24th, 2022, 9:08 am

I don't buy it. Unless some significant (read: more so than in the past) portion of old housing stock is empty, then there's just no way.

The Census Bureau was really pessimistic on cities and urban areas in pre-2020 estimates, and they got burned for it. They also underestimated Minnesota's population last decade. I imagine they're overestimating the effect of COVID (or perhaps college students really do make up all the loss.) Reports of population loss in the cities simply don't match with rising prices and limited vacancy in the city (side note: could the loss, if it's real, be concentrated in inner-ring suburbs? I've always thought they offer "the worst of both world's.")

The Met Council is disputing the figures, and I'd stick with them. They're closer to the ground, and they had better pre-2020 estimates than the Census by a lot.

Regardless, this is a damaging report, because it gives outstaters/Republicans/anti-urbanites the vindication they've sought for a couple years now to prove their nonsense "cITieS aRe DyINg!" claims.

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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby LakeCharles » March 24th, 2022, 9:22 am

I don't know that I buy the college students angle, at least for Hennepin County. Hennepin County doesn't have many colleges/universities that draw people from outstate. I doubt many people moved far away from home to attend Hennepin Tech.
Yes, there were certainly some students at the U of M & Augsburg who stayed home. But a large chunk of them come from Hennepin County anyway and another large chunk stayed (I know a group of graduate students, all originally from other states, who stayed here through COVID). Finally, there are a lot of students from Hennepin County who were attending elsewhere (UW system, etc.) who stayed home, thus offsetting the U students who stayed home.

phop
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby phop » March 24th, 2022, 9:33 am

The U of M has (or had) thousands of international students pre-pandemic.

LakeCharles
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby LakeCharles » March 24th, 2022, 9:45 am

The U of M has (or had) thousands of international students pre-pandemic.
They claim to have had ~2,500 international undergrads. Another ~3,500 graduate students, but they were far more likely to stay. So yes, if 2,500 undergrads all returned home, that's a little bit, but they represent <0.2% of the county.

alexschief
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby alexschief » March 24th, 2022, 11:06 am

The Census 1 year estimates have always been a bit dodgy, and I can only imagine that the pandemic exacerbated those issues. I think these are useful for telling a certain story, especially in relation to each other within the same year but "what is the exact population of X?" probably isn't a question that today's estimates can answer very well.

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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby xandrex » March 24th, 2022, 11:44 am

I don't know that I buy the college students angle, at least for Hennepin County. Hennepin County doesn't have many colleges/universities that draw people from outstate.
Not sure if you mean "from outside the state" or "from Greater Minnesota" when you say outstate in this instance, but I don't know why you'd discount the University of Minnesota as a potential major factor.

Yes, a lot of students at the U are from the Twin Cities - and it wouldn't surprise me if a decent chunk of them decided to stay home in Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka, or Ramsey County given the situation. There's also literally thousands of students from Greater Minnesota, thousands more from across the country, and many international students (nearly 2,300 from China alone). https://idr.umn.edu/reports-by-topic-en ... nd-country

I, too, am skeptical of the Census numbers. But if they're actually on to something, I wouldn't doubt U enrollment played a factor.

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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby Korh » April 28th, 2022, 7:10 am

Kinda late to the discussion but stumbled on this article that might give a little more insight
https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/ ... -2021.html
Tl:Dr a lot of jobs are moving out of state and taking workers with them with the biggest outflow being to rural Wisconsin of all places.
Article suggests this might be because of remote work being on the rise and somewhat jokingly assumes people are installing fiber optics at their summer cabins and living there full time.

twincitizen
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby twincitizen » April 11th, 2023, 2:08 pm

A recent presentation to Met Council on updating the regional long-range population forecasts: https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... t-PPT.aspx

Earlier this year, Met Council released revised forecasts for 2030 and 2040, but they omitted households from the projections, only forecasting population and jobs. https://metrocouncil.org/Data-and-Maps/ ... 2023).aspx The complete revised forecast including household growth projections is supposed to be released later this month.

I had to go pretty far upthread to find the last time we talked about long-range projections and was reminded that Met Council basically only touches these every 10 years. Anyways, here's a post where I quoted a couple of the initial estimates from Met Council which were subsequently revised downward a couple of times, with the new estimates below. Unfortunately none of the old links to Met Council's previous forecasts work, so I just have those 5 cities as a comparison.
Met Council's preliminary 2040 estimates are out: http://www.metrocouncil.org/News-Events ... ea-gr.aspx (broken)

Mpls: 488k
St Paul: 338k
Bloomington: 113k
Edina: 71k (wowzers! I guess Southdale-adjacent high rise apartment construction is only getting started)
St Louis Park: 68k
Newly revised estimates for those same cities:
Mpls: 464,900
St Paul: 334,700
Bloomington: 93,600
Edina: 53,300 (err...that's a pretty huge decrease)
St Louis Park: 54,500
Following up on my posts from last year and earlier, numbers have been revised down even lower in these newly updated 2040 estimates:
Mpls: 449,400
St Paul: 334,100
Bloomington: 91,800
Edina: 50,800
St Louis Park: 51,300
Newly released 2040 estimates for those same 5 cities (quoted posts are of estimates released c. 2013-15):
Mpls: 485,000 (back to the original high estimate prior to the downward revisions)
St Paul: 334,100 (no change to the 2015 estimate)
Bloomington: 95,900
Edina: 63,600
St Louis Park: 55,070

mamundsen
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby mamundsen » April 11th, 2023, 6:52 pm

Way too many small municipalities. Would we ever see some consolidation of these <1,000 population cities into a neighbor? There has to be some economic incentive to be had!

twincitizen
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby twincitizen » April 12th, 2023, 10:09 am

If not for generous state/regional support over the years, particularly LGA payments from the state and Fiscal Disparities tax base sharing within the 7-county metro, I think it is likely some mergers would have already happened out of economic necessity. Without those programs (both of which are good policy!), property taxes would be far too high and/or level of services too low in many of the smaller, weaker tax base suburbs. I wouldn't want to see the legislature do anything to weaken those two programs, but there absolutely should be a study done of how much of that money is "wasted" in a sense by having so many separate municipalities. I wouldn't be opposed to there being a minimum size for municipalities in the metro (geographic and population size) to qualify for LGA and Fiscal Disparities. Bare minimum should be 10,000 population, and at least 4 square miles.

alexschief
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby alexschief » April 12th, 2023, 10:27 am

Minneapolis should make it an explicit goal to hit 500k in population by 2040. And St. Paul can do a lot better than the projection; 350k should be the floor.

Back in the day, city population used to be a point of civic pride and competition (and no small amount of fraud) between cities. No reason why it couldn't become one again. A greater percentage of metro-area population in the two core cities would be good for the climate and economy.

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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby MNdible » April 12th, 2023, 11:25 am

It's worth remembering that a lot of the suburbs have formed cooperative agreements with neighbors or their county to provide municipal services more efficiently.

twincitizen
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Re: Latest Census Estimates and Met Council Projections

Postby twincitizen » May 30th, 2023, 3:37 pm

Happy population estimates day to those who celebrate. Census estimates were out a few weeks ago, but Met Council's are considered to be more accurate since they are based off of additional data points like the exact number of units added since last year, etc.

https://metrocouncil.org/Data-and-Maps/ ... mates.aspx

The biggest factor to note here is the decline in average household size is holding down total population numbers across the metro.


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