Many big cities in the Northeast and Midwest hemorrhaged population in the last half-century. Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis are far smaller than they were in 1970. Factories closed and manufacturing jobs departed for the South or foreign countries. Climate control made summer life endurable in previously unattractive places. Then there was crime. Crime rates have fluctuated in the last few decades: high and rising through the 1990s; down in the early years of the new century; increasing at an alarming rate around 2020; rising disturbingly in many cities in the several years since the pandemic abated, then declining again. Could crime be the main reason so many cities lost so much of their population over the entire period? Henry Canaday, an economist and longtime business journalist, has come up with compelling data that purports to show that the connection between crime and population loss may be more direct and more powerful than most experts have believed, reports Governing. In a yet-to-be-published report, Crime & Population Changes in 21 U.S. Cities, 1960-2023, Canaday divides cities into two categories: those that sustained a rate of fewer than 2 murders per year per 10,000 population and those that consistently experienced a higher rate. The ones below 2.0 nearly all gained people in the period he examined; those below 1.5 gained substantially. Cities with rates above 2.0 suffered population losses. This holds true, Canaday reports, even when other factors such as climate and economic change are taken into account.
“Murder rates around 1 per 10,000, reminiscent of the 1950s, are apparently comfortable for city dwellers,” Canaday writes. “But once that rate gets much above and stays above 2 per 10,000 people start to leave.” It would be foolish to attribute Detroit’s long-term population loss solely to its rising crime rate, but the connection is difficult to avoid. The city has lost vast numbers of residents with the shrinking number of jobs in the automobile industry, but it began its greatest decline in the 1960s, just at the time when the murder rate was moving alarmingly upward. Some cities have kept the murder rate under control and managed to gain in population or at least stabilize it. Boston lost about 30 percent of its population between 1950 and 1980 but began growing again in the 1980s, boosted by its emergence as a center of high-tech industry but also by its relative safety. Boston’s murder rate has never risen above 2.0, and it has stood at about half that level for most of the past three decades. Is this cause and effect? That’s impossible to prove. Canaday believes it may be. The clearest successes are in the South and West. Rapidly growing San Antonio has never had a murder rate as high as 2.0 per 10,000 residents. San Diego has held its rate to 1.0, and its population numbers have soared. Canaday contends that murder rates have correlated with law enforcement staffing. Baltimore has a police force about 8 percent smaller than the one it had in 2019; it also recorded a murder rate, of 5.6 per 10,000 residents. Buffalo has increased its police staffing by about 3 percent during the same period, while holding its murder rate at between 1.5 and 2.6. A coincidence? Canaday doesn’t think so.
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