The Fastest Shrinking County in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 30, 9:30AM EDT

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The Fastest Shrinking County in America — © DutcherAerials / E+ via Getty Images

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2022 population estimates were just released. The analysis covers 3,144 counties and looks at their populations at the midpoint of 2022, and, in most cases, compares it to the population at mid-2021. (Here are seven major American cities that have lost half their populations.)
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Census Bureau experts saw a pattern: “All 10 of the top fastest-growing counties were in the South or West, and 9 of the 10 were metropolitan counties.” Dr. Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau’s population division, commented: “The migration and growth patterns for counties edged closer to pre-pandemic levels this year.”
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Many of America’s largest counties did not lose people over the period. Several that had been bleeding people at least reached a point of population equilibrium.

The county that lost the most people is also America’s largest. Los Angeles, with a total population of 9,721,138, lost 90,704. One measure of how huge it is comes from a comparison to the second largest country, Cook County, which includes Chicago and had a population of 5,109,292.
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Of the 10 counties that lost the most people, all lost at least 12,000. Three lost at least 50,000. Six lost over 20,000. Three of five New York City counties made the list. All had total populations in excess of 1.2 million
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These are the 10 counties that lost the most people:

County	2022 Population	Decline
Los Angeles, Calif.	9,721,138	−90,704
Cook, Ill.	5,109,292	−68,314
Queens, N.Y.	2,278,029	−50,112
Kings, N.Y.	2,590,516	−46,970
Bronx, N.Y.	1,379,946	−41,143
Philadelphia, Pa.	1,567,258	−22,222
Wayne, Mich.	1,757,043	−16,030
Santa Clara, Calif.	1,870,945	−15,650
Alameda, Calif.	1,628,997	−14,840
Allegheny, Pa.	1,233,253	−12,192

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.