Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Maybe not, but over 1/3 of the population of the county lives in the I-79 corridor, not Butler the town or its surrounding area, and an additional 15k off of PA-28. All of these people live within 45 minutes (typical commute distances) of downtown Pittsburgh.
Much of the population growth is likely, then, due to the particular dynamics of population replacement here rather any economic reason to do with Butler itself:
As folks in Butler die off, their old homes (being in safe communities) are bought up and maybe renovated by new families - or flipped by other for them - looking to raise their children outside of the city, but still within reasonable distance. Thus, a single old person is replaced by four or five new people, even in the absence of new build construction. This alone can marginally affect commuter patterns, and with a 25% threshold for an outlying county to be considered part of a metropolitan area, 1/3 of the population living within a reasonable distance to commute to Allegheny County (not JUST Pittsburgh) can easily shift those numbers above 25%.
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Let's take a look to Venango County a rural county neighbouring Butler and which has nothing to do with Pittsburgh. Let's also examine Fayette County, a collection of coal communities that developed independently from Pittsburgh.
1950
Butler: 97,320
Fayette: 189,899
Venango: 65,328
2020
Butler: 193,763
Fayette: 128,804
Venango: 50,454
The pattern couldn't be more clear: Butler growth curve is the most typical example of a post-war suburb county.
Quote:
Originally Posted by benp
Every US Metro area of over 1M people showed a population gain between 2010 and 2020. Obviously the discussions are more about historic declines from peak population, rather than continued decline at this point (or why have this thread at all?)
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Indeed. Specially as we just learn that Pittsburgh and Buffalo are growing again after 5, 6 decades of continuous decline. Or the British metro areas that kinda plateaued in the 1930's already, declined badly till the 1990's but now are posting very robust growth.