Half the towns on our shirts got smaller
Half the towns on our shirts have fewer people in them than the shirt says.
We checked. Every population we print came from a data load in 2011, which used Census estimates from a few years before that. This month we lined all of them up against the Census Bureau's July 2024 population estimates. That's 19,297 towns.
9,817 of them shrank. 9,379 grew. 101 came out exactly the same, to the person.
The country grew. Most small towns didn't.
Add up every number on our shirts and you get 188.7 million people. Add up the same towns today and it's 211.5 million. By the only total that ever makes the news, everything got bigger.
It didn't. The growth piled up in a few hundred places. Of the 693 cities that were 50,000 or bigger on our shirts, only 15% have lost people since. Of the 12,693 towns under 2,500, 61% have.
That's the last fifteen years in two numbers. The big places got bigger, and the small places got quieter.
Where the number went down
Detroit is the biggest single drop. Our shirt says 912,062. The 2024 estimate is 645,705. That's a loss of more than a quarter million people, which is bigger than almost every city we sell.
Gary, Indiana went from 95,920 to 67,555. Cairo, Illinois, down at the southern tip of the state where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi, went from 3,105 to 1,523. Half the town, in about fifteen years.
By state, West Virginia leads. 77% of the West Virginia towns we print are smaller now. Illinois is at 72%, Kansas 71%, Mississippi and Louisiana 70%. At the other end, only 16% of our towns in Oregon and Washington shrank, and 17% in Utah.
Two of them happened in a day
Most decline is slow. A plant closes, the kids move to the city, the high school consolidates with the one in the next town over. Nobody notices it year to year.
Paradise, California was 26,469 on our shirt. On November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire burned through it and killed 85 people. The 2020 Census counted 4,764 residents. It's coming back. The 2024 estimate is 9,114, nearly double the 2020 count.
Pacific Junction, Iowa was 510 on our shirt. In March 2019 the Mills County levees failed and the Missouri River put the whole town underwater. Most of the damaged homes were bought out and torn down. The 2024 estimate is 99.
Those shirts aren't wrong, exactly. They're the last record of what those towns looked like before one very bad day.
And then there's Texas
Growth went the other way just as hard, and it bunched up.
Celina, Texas was 5,557 on our shirt. It's 51,661 now. Prosper went from 7,053 to 44,503. Princeton went from 6,117 to 37,019. All three sit north of Dallas, where farm roads turned into subdivisions faster than anybody could reprint a sign.
Fort Worth passed a million. Our shirt says 703,073. The estimate says 1,008,106.
The wildest one is Vineyard, Utah. Our shirt says 148. The estimate says 16,077. There are high school gyms in Utah that seat more people than lived in Vineyard when we printed that shirt.
Most towns barely moved
For every Celina and every Cairo, there are thousands of towns that held still. Beloit, Wisconsin was 36,160 on our shirt and it's 36,633 now. Sidney, New York went from 3,692 to 3,613. Seventy-nine people, which is about one graduating class.
The median change across all 19,297 towns is less than half a percent. But the typical town hides a lot of motion. More than half of them are off by at least 10% in one direction or the other.
What we're doing about it
For the shirts that already exist, nothing. We've made our peace with that. They're a time capsule and we like them that way.
New shirts are different. When we print a town from here on, it gets the Census Bureau's current estimate, and the listing says exactly which figure it is and when it's from.
The sign outside your hometown can't make that promise. It's probably wrong right now, and nobody's coming to fix it.