Continuing a long trend, the population in Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region grew more slowly than that of the nation, according to data just released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Even the higher rates of growth over recent years in the Hispanic population slowed a bit. And while the region continues to become grayer, with a growing elderly population, millennials are becoming a larger part of the population.
The U.S. population grew by 3.3 percent over the last five years, but it increased in Pennsylvania by just 0.7 percent, so though the commonwealth is the sixth most populous state, it is 43rd in population growth rate over the last five years. The rate in Allegheny County was 0.6 percent, according to census data released last week.
International migration boosted the county’s numbers, as 11,530 immigrants settled here over the past five years. The Hispanic growth rate of 21.7 percent, an average rate of 5 percent per year, was the highest among racial-ethnic groups.
But Chris Briem, a regional economist who studies demographic trends at the University of Pittsburgh, pointed out on his blog, Nullspace, that the growth rate has slowed — from 5.6 percent in 2011 to 4.1 percent in 2014.
“If you wonder how that fits into the larger story that the Hispanic population in Pittsburgh is extremely small, realize that the size of that population is so low that even if the local growth rate exceeds the national growth rate by several percentage points, it still will take decades to really catch up to what is a national average. and that assumes there is no more slowing of the trend locally,” Mr. Briem wrote.
While the region’s Hispanic population is still very small — about 1.9 percent of the population in Allegheny County — it slowly is beginning to diversify, local Latino leaders say.
Brent Rondon, a natave of Peru who is now manager of the Global Business Program at the Small Business Development Center at Duquesne University, began to notice more Hispanics settling in the area, mostly students and academics at first, after he came to Pittsburgh 20 years ago.
“For a while, Pittsburgh was one of the places in the U.S. where you could find a large group of professional Hispanics,” he said. “The last 10 years or so, I started to see an immigrant population come and find jobs in the service sector.”
The Asian population nearly matched the Hispanic growth rate, increasing by 20.8 percent since 2010, an average annual growth of 4.9 percent, while the black population increased slightly at 0.7 percent and the white population actually fell by 0.8 percent.
As expected, Allegheny County’s population continued to age. The median age climbed to 41.3 years old, and deaths outnumbered births by 2,152 from 2010 to 2014. In 2010, the county’s population stood at 1.224 million.
Richard Schulz, director of the University Center for Social and Urban Research at Pitt, said the elderly population will continue to grow, increasing by almost 20 percent by 2030, as the Baby Boomer generation starts to enter old age.
“People are living longer,” he said. “The rapid growth of the elderly population that we’re going to see over the next two decades, both in Pittsburgh and the country as a whole, is driven almost exclusively by Baby Boomers moving into old age.”
Even with the rapidly aging population, millennials took over as the largest generation in Allegheny County in 2014, on par with the United States, with a 27.5 percent share of the population, edging the Baby Boomers generation by a slim 0.6 percent margin.
“Millennials will be an increasing proportion of the total, and Baby Boomers are going to decline because they’re going to die out,” Mr. Schulz said.
However, white Baby Boomers still boasted the largest demographic when broken down by age and race at 283,870.
These trends are expected to continue in the near future as immigration rates continue to rise and the Baby Boomers, formerly the largest population in the history of the United States, continue to age.
First Published June 28, 2015, 12:00am at https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/06/28/Region-continues-to-gray-but-some-growth-coming-from-millennials-Hispanics/stories/201506280179
Jacob Betzner 