For the first time since 1970, Hamilton County is headed toward finishing a decade with an increase in population.
That was the word last week from the U.S. Census Bureau. Its latest annual estimate put 809,099 people in Hamilton County in 2016. That’s only a 0.8 percent increase since 2010, but considering that Cincinnati’s home county was losing population for four to five decades, any increase is good news.
Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes said he will reserve judgment until the next official Census count is taken in 2020. “However,” he says, “I’m encouraged by the reported slight uptick considering that property taxes and sewer rates here are quite high. Compared to some other large counties which were the biggest population losers, like Chicago, Detroit and the independent city of Baltimore, we look good. For example, Cook County, Illinois, had the largest population loss of any county in the country, down 66,000 from 2015 to 2016.”
With the exception of Dearborn County, Ind., all of Hamilton’s surrounding counties continued to grow in population. The metropolitan region as a whole grew 2.4 percent, to 2.17 million, from 2010 to 2016.
Hamilton County’s population remains lower than what it was in 1960. Over the following 50 years, people fled the county in favor of the mushrooming suburbs, where fields were bulldozed into subdivisions and shopping centers. The headcount in Hamilton County bottomed out at 800,621 in 2011 but has been growing ever since.
“Part of the growth in Hamilton County could be that young people are not as interested in living in the suburbs,” says Fritz Casey-Leininger, an associate history professor and chairman of the University of Cincinnati History in the City Initiative. “Based on the news reports I read, younger people are less inclined to drive cars and get driver’s licenses and more inclined to use public transportation. They’re also fine with living in racially diverse neighborhoods than they were 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago.”
Perhaps the big news on the population front in Ohio is that Franklin County (Columbus) is now bigger than Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). According to the new Census estimates, Franklin County has 1,264,518 people, compared with Cuyahoga’s 1,249,352. That flip-flop came about from an 8.7 percent population gain in Franklin County from 2010 to 2016 as Cuyahoga County lost 2.4 percent.
Delaware County, north of Columbus, had the biggest percentage gain during the last six years — 12.8 percent. Columbiana County was the biggest loser at minus-3.9 percent.
CONTACT JAMES McNAIR, jmcnair@citybeat.com, 513-914-2736, @jmacnews on Twitter
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2017.