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Region showed net loss of nearly 58,000 from 1995 to 2000

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Pittsburgh continued to lose population in the late 1990s, as some 58,000 more people left the region than entered it, according to new Census figures.

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The region's recovery from the massive manufacturing job and population losses of the 1980s turned out to be inadequate to keep many people from chasing opportunities elsewhere during the dot.com boom in the late '90s.

The Census Bureau's new figures show that 149,474 people moved to the six-county Pittsburgh metropolitan area from 1995 to 2000, while 201,471 left for other parts of the country -- including other parts of Pennsylvania.

The report was based on people's responses to the 2000 census long-form question, which asked if the respondent had lived in the same address five years earlier. Those who responded "no" were then asked to say from where they had moved.

The difference between those leaving and those entering --57,997 -- was smaller than it was in 1985-1990, when 85,000 more people migrated out than in. Those losses reflected a steel industry collapse that had forced tens of thousands to move elsewhere in search of a paycheck, including 42,580 in 1985 alone.

Still, the net loss was far bigger than it was in the early '90s, when those leaving outnumbered those coming in by just hundreds, leading some to believe the worst of the drain had ended as manufacturing stabilized and overall employment growth picked up.

So why did the migration numbers improve in the early '90s, only to flip-flop in the latter half of the decade? The national economy had a lot to do with it, said regional economist Paul Flora.

At the height of the nation's economic boom in the late 1990s, "the relative advantages of being elsewhere were greater," said Flora, who works for the University of Pittsburgh.

People seeking more money and a wider array of job opportunities were better served looking to such high-growth places as Seattle, Portland, Ore., Denver or Phoenix. Those cities all attracted more people than they lost from 1995-2000, with Phoenix scoring the highest among 15 PG Benchmark regions of similar size.

Now that the U.S. economy has slowed again, the job opportunities that had lured Pittsburghers to other regions in the late '90s either do not exist or are not as abundant. Because of that, Flora expects Pittsburgh's net migration numbers to improve again, just as they did during a recession in the early 1990s.

To followers of the region's economy, migration is an important measure because it indicates whether the region is attracting new faces. But migration is only half the population equation.

The other half has to do with births and deaths, and the region's deaths continue to outnumber its births, shackling it with a so-called "natural decline" in population.

Without a natural increase in new babies, the region will have a tough time overcoming slow migration rates.

It is "the legacy of losing so many young people during the 1980s," said Harold Miller, president of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. "It is simply going to take us a while to overcome that."