Five Louisiana cities among top 50 in US in rate of out-migration – including the number-one city in all the US
Five Louisiana cities among top 50 in US in rate of out-migration – including the number-one city in all the US
August 31, 2022 by tomaswell
Wall Street 24/7, that online service that tracks everything from the best cars to cities with the highest housing costs to state rankings on a multitude of issues, has just listed the 50 US cities with the highest population growth over a single year’s time.
Not a single Louisiana city made the list.
Conversely, Wall Street 24/7 also has a list of the 50 US cities with the highest percentages of out-migration.
Five Louisiana cities adorn that list, including the city with the very highest rate of population loss.
The highest rates of growth among the top 50 cities ranged from 93.9 percent growth rate experienced by Brookland, Arkansas to the astonishing growth rate of 1,364.6 percent of Fulshear, Texas (from a population of 1,170 in 2019 to 17,136 in 2020).
Three cities had population losses of .4 of a percentage point. They were Boulder, Colorado, Springfield, Illinois, and Alexandria, Louisiana.
You have to come all the way down to 29th biggest drop in out-migration rate to find both New Orleans-Metairie and Monroe, which had population losses of .7 percent each. The Shreveport-Bossier City metro area, with a combined population of 389,155, experienced the 20th largest loss in out-migration at .8 percent.
But the single city in the US with the largest rate of out-migration (5.3 percent) was Lake Charles, with a population of 210,362. Much of that population loss, however, can be attributed to a pair of hurricanes, Laura and Delta, that devastated much of the city, twin disasters from which the city has yet to fully recover because of a lack of federal aid and widespread contractor fraud and shoddy repair work.
In all, the five Louisiana cities combined to lose 27,198 residents in that single year with Lake Charles experiencing a loss of 11,914 residents, easily surpassing the 9,824 residents lost by the much larger New Orleans-Metairie area (pop. 1,261,726)
Alexandria (pop. 150,890) lost 706 residents from 2019 to 2020, while Monroe (pop. 204,884) lost 1,456 during that same period and Shreveport-Bossier (pop. 389,155) lost 3,298 residents.
By comparison, Jackson, Mississippi (pop. 587,202) had the 33rd largest percentage of out-migration at .6 percent (a loss of 3,656 residents), and the metro area of Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria, VA-Maryland-West Virginia, with a population of nearly 6.4 million, had an out-migration of .8 percent, or the equivalent of the population of a mid-sized city: 66,811.