Each year, roughly 40 million Americans – about 14 percent of the U.S. population – move at least once. Much of that movement includes younger people relocating within cities, but it is trends of Americans moving to warmer climates, more affordable areas and better job opportunities that have largely determined migration patterns in recent decades.
Because of those long-term patterns, as well as the recent period of economic recovery, cities in some parts of the country have lost tens of thousands of residents – and parts of Hampton Roads are among those cities.
Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Newport News ranked 14th together as a region in a list of 50 U.S. cities that Americans are abandoning. Populations in these cities have decreased due to migration by 17,297 from 2010 to 2017.
The three cities’ natural growth between the same years were 163,787 births to 97,935 deaths, bringing the population change to 2.9 percent.
To identify the U.S.’s fastest declining cities, 24/7 Wall Street reviewed the annual estimates of resident population and the estimates of the components of residential population change from April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2017, provided by the American Community Survey. Population and home value data also came from the 2016 American Community Survey.
The full list of declining cities is here.
