“This is absolutely bad news. We had thought, given many of the other positive trends, that 50 years of population losses had finally reversed direction,” Mayor Francis G. Slay of St. Louis wrote on his blog. “I believe that this will require an urgent and thorough rethinking of how we do almost everything.”
Demographers said they had expected gentrification to buoy the city’s population, but instead St. Louis posted a decline of 14,000 white residents, compounded by a loss of 21,000 black residents. By contrast, St. Louis County, which rings the city, noted an increase in its black population of 39,000, though that gain was overshadowed by a loss of 84,000 whites, for an overall population loss.
“There seems to be some black suburbanization going on in some of these counties,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “Whites appear to be going further out.”
And from the Post Dispatch (Doug Moore):
He touched on the issue of white flight from north St. Louis County school districts, but could offer no reason for the migration. The Hazelwood School District has had a 30 percent drop in white students from 2000, as has Normandy. Ferguson-Florissant schools saw a 32 percent drop.
....Maplewood Mayor James White attributed his city's loss of 13 percent of its population to the housing torn down to make way for commercial development east of Hanley Road, including a Walmart, Sam's Club and Lowe's store.
For the rest of the St. Louis region, it was good news. St. Charles County grew by 27 percent. Its largest city, O'Fallon, shot up by nearly 72 percent. It is now the seventh largest city in the state. Even with that impressive growth, it's a slowdown from a nearly 147 percent jump a decade before, when the city moved to 13th from 28th...
St. Charles County, with 360,485 residents, surpasses the city of St. Louis. Lincoln County also grew, by 35 percent. Jefferson County is now the fifth largest county in the state, with 218,733 people, a 10.4 percent increase from 2000...
Rainford (Slay's chief of staff) said that if there was a silver lining, it was that not all parts of the city saw their population drop. Downtown and midtown wards saw growth. But north St. Louis was hit hard. The Hyde Park neighborhood saw a loss of 28 percent of its population. The Ville lost 26 percent. At least seven wards in north St. Louis had double-digit losses.
Rainford said the city had done a decent job attracting empty nesters, young people and gays and lesbians. But it has been unable to hold on to the families that are now presumably moving to the suburbs.
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