"Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage"

Henry Canaday's insightful new study is now available.

One of my best veteran commenters, Henry Canaday, has authored an important paper about America in the 21st Century. You can request a copy of his study at his Linked-In page.

From Governing:

Murder and Population Decline: A Troubling Urban Linkage

An economist is making the case for such a correlation, and it carries a ring of plausibility.

Sept. 16, 2024 • Alan Ehrenhalt

Alan Ehrenhalt is a contributing editor for Governing. He served for 19 years as executive editor of Governing Magazine. He can be reached at ehrenhalt@yahoo.com.

One thing we know for certain about American cities is that many of the big ones 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. Many lesser cities have suffered the same decline. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why this happened. Factories closed and manufacturing jobs departed for the South or foreign countries. Climate control made summer life endurable in previously unattractive places. And then there was crime.

Crime rates have fluctuated quite a bit in the last few decades: high and rising through the 1990s; down, somewhat mysteriously, 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. But could crime be the main reason so many cities lost so much of their population over the entire period? That might seem a difficult case to make.

Now Henry Canaday, an economist and longtime business journalist, has come up with some 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.

In a yet-to-be-published report, Crime & Population Changes in 21 U.S. Cities, 1960-2023, Canaday presents some numbers that seem almost too precise to be true. He divides cities into two categories: those that sustained a rate of less 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.”

The numbers remain consistent for the last several years as well as for the past half-century, even though the murder rates nationally are considerably lower now than they were in the 1990s. St. Louis had a murder rate of 7.3 per 10,000 residents from 2019 to 2023 and lost 6 percent of its population. New Orleans lost 5 percent of its people amid a murder rate of 6.0. Meanwhile, of large cities that held murder rates below 2.0 in the last four years, more than three-quarters increased or maintained their populations.

I can’t vouch for every single decimal in Canaday’s detailed report of more than 130 pages. But the overall conclusion does carry a ring of plausibility. It rings true not only for the past several years but for the entire period of more than 60 years that he has set out to study.

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. Its murder rate per 10,000 residents was well under 1.0 in the 1950s; by 1975 it was up above 5.0. In those years the population was falling by about 15 percent per decade. Only in the past several years has the city begun to see the murder rate go down, but as recently as last year, at a moment when the city was enjoying a downtown renaissance, it was still close to 4.0 per 10,000 Detroiters.

Baltimore has lost nearly 40 percent of its population since 1960; during most of those years it experienced an uninterrupted rise in its murder rate, reaching 6.0 per 10,000 in 2020 before beginning a modest recent improvement.

AS STRIKING AS THE NEGATIVE NUMBERS from these cities is, so is the trajectory of cities that 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 a matter of cause and effect? That’s impossible to prove. Canaday believes it may be.

Pittsburgh lost nearly half its population over half a century, but has been able to keep its numbers relatively stable in the past decade. It has consistently kept its murder rate below Canaday’s 2.0 trigger during the entire period. Some of Pittsburgh’s return to stability is undoubtedly a function of its ability to rebuild its economy on the twin pillars of higher education and medical research. But keeping the murder rate down is part of the story.

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 an enviable 1.0, and its population numbers have soared.

Of the big cities on the West Coast, Portland and San Francisco have badly underperformed their potential (although Frisco seems to be getting its act in order in recent months), while Seattle and Los Angeles have struggled.

You don’t hear much about San Diego, and I haven’t spent much time there in a decade, but I get the sense it’s indicative of just how utopian West Coast cities could be if they don’t shoot themselves in the foot.

Read Ehrenhalt’s whole analysis at Governing and ask for Henry’s big paper here.