1,000 Residents a Month: DC’s Population Rose Swiftly in 2014-2015

• May 19, 2016
• 3 Comments

by Nena Perry-Brown

This morning, the U.S. Census Bureau released data that showed that the District of Columbia had the 14th-largest population increase for a 12-month period in 2014 and 2015.

From July 2014 to July 2015, DC gained 12,392 residents, which averages out to the 1,000-person-a-month population increase that is so often touted by city officials. The city’s population as of July 2015 sat at 672,228. During that same period, the city added just over 3,400 housing units.

New York City saw the largest population gain, with 55,211 new residents, while Texas had five cities in the top 15, and California had three. The next-largest population increase was a distant second behind that of New York, with Houston gaining 40,032 people.

For the full report, click here.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_added_1000_residents_per_month_july_2014-july_2015/11254

3 Comments

1. skidrowedc@gmail.com said at 9:43 pm on Thursday May 19, 2016:
   Whenever statistics like these are presented, it is important to be precise about the entities each stat covers. City proper, statistical metropolitan area, or something else? In this case, for example, if the District of Columbia (proper, with some 660,000 residents as of July 2014) gained 12,392 new residents, and New York City (i.e. the 5 boroughs, population approx 8.5M as of July 2014) gained 55,211, then DC's rate of growth is almost three times New York's. In most respects--certainly including real estate demand, especially new buildings per UrbanTurf's focus--the rate of growth is more significant than the absolute numbers. But if any of these refer to metro areas, the analysis must be quite different. It's not so much a question of apples vs apples, because each city and metro area have considerable variation anyway. It's just a question of knowing what's being compared. For example, (the City of) Houston (not metro area), starting with about 2.2M people, shows a rate of growth similar to DC's. But it's a much lower density city covering almost 10 times the land area of DC, so the effect of new development overall is much less dramatic. But if the 40,000 new residents are in metro Houston (approx. population 6.4M), then the growth rate is similar to New York City's (5 borough's), although again the actual effect would be quite different.

1. TBex said at 10:08 pm on Thursday May 19, 2016:
   Thanks skidrowedc, I was thinking many of the same things. Unfortunately, the linked report doesn't have a table of percentage growth long enough to capture DC (we didn't crack the top 20); would love to see that data (but not enough to download the released data and compute it myself, at the moment). The data Urbanturf discussed (number of people added in the city proper) is mostly unexciting and mostly tracks population size in the cities. NYC is #1 by both metrics. DC is #14 by pop added while #22 in current pop. Comparing the two might also be an interesting visual, in case there are outliers and overperformers (which I guess DC appears to be; #14 in raw numbers added isn't bad for #22 in population). If weighed against the metropolitan statistical area (pop rank #7), we might perform even better, but then that implies we're sprawling more than preferable.

1. PCDC said at 8:14 pm on Friday May 20, 2016:
   To answer the question. This is all for DC Proper. The actual population of DC right now is 672,000. It increased by 12,000 people last year. I knew this immediately upon reading it. The population increase is not news, the census reported the increase in December from 660,000 to 672,000. The housing portion is news. So what is happening is DC is increasing in density and more housing is being created within the city. But it may not be enough housing to handle the increase in the number of residents.