Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I don’t want to go to Chelsea

Best post title ever! (I’ve been waiting all day to use it). From the Boston Globe: “US finds big drop in Hub populationStudy estimates loss is 5.1% since 2000”:

Boston lost 30,107 residents in the first half of this decade, a precipitous drop that ranked the city among the biggest population losers of any major municipality in the country, according to US Census Bureau estimates to be released today.

The loss represented a 5.1 percent fall from the city's population of 589,141 residents in 2000, the bureau said. It was the seventh highest percentage decrease among large US cities; Cincinnati had the steepest drop from 2000 to 2005, losing 6.8 percent, followed by Detroit, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Flint, Mich.
It’s more of the blue to red shift.

(P.S. - The post title is a song by Elvis Costello. Yeah!)

2 comments:

Brian said...

I think that fat slob Michael Moore accounted for Flint's population loss single-handedly.

Anonymous said...

Cincinnati had the steepest drop from 2000 to 2005, losing 6.8 percent...It’s more of the blue to red shift.

Yes, it's curtains for that hotbed of liberalism: Cincinnati, Ohio.

A discussion about downtown Boston's shrinkage might be interesting. Assuming that it's proof that the GOP is on the march is silly. For one thing, the premise relies way too heavily on the concept of "Greater Boston." Counting the surrounding metropolitan area, the population base creeps up jussssst a hair, from half a mil to around 5.8 million. Check out the numbers for the neighboring cities and towns. The respective populations of Quincy, Newton, Cambridge, Brookline, Brockton, Lynn, Somerville, Waltham, and Weymouth are up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, and up. The only near-Boston locale I could find that slipped was Medford. People might be moving the hell outta Boston, but they're not fleeing very far.

Many cities had double-digit population gains during the previous decade. But in between the Texas towns are those crimson red heartlands of Las Vegas, San Francisco, Portland, and New York City.