I dreamed Columbus was climbing the census charts... 
I thought I heard on the news very early this morning that Columbus was now the 14th largest city in the US. Maybe I was more asleep than awake but I tried to find the info on the US Census Bureau site and via Google when I'd had some coffee.
National
The big news from the US Census Bureau is of course that Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the US now surpassing Philadelphia.
New York city is growing. Like most newspapers The New York Times covered the story that populations are growing in the south and western US and declining in some parts of the country including the area referred to as the "Rust Belt."
I personally hate the term "Rust Belt." I get it but I hate it.
"Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and other cities in the Rust Belt and upstate New York recorded population losses of more than 5 percent since 2000. But, except for Cleveland, these older cities recorded smaller losses since 2005, suggesting that their population declines may have been stanched. Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis gained population in the latest one-year period."
The CNN Money article about the fastest growing US Cities says of large cities in our region : "Cleveland (- 6.9 percent), Pittsburgh (-6.5 percent) and Buffalo (-5.7 percent) also continued to show big losses since 2000."
Central Ohio
The Columbus Dispatch story about the same info from the Census bureau says Columbus is the 15th largest City in the US. Written by Lisa Halverstadt and Jim Woods of the Columbus Dispatch the story this story is more focused on local, Powell is growing by 80%...New Albany 70+%, Pickerington is the number three biggest growth area in Central Ohio... that the old inner ring suburbs Bexley, Worthington, Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights, Minerva Park etc. lost population in the past year. In "Suburbs beyond 1-270 top growth" The Columbus Dispatch does have a table that shows Columbus population grew by 3%, Cincinnati population grew by .3% and the rest of the big cities in Ohio lost population.
"Housing starts are down locally and nationally. But the suburbs are prospering outside I-270, where they have room to grow and popular school systems.
Older, inner-ring suburbs in central Ohio -- Bexley, Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights and Worthington -- have declined in population by about 7 percent.
Still, central Ohio remains Ohio's fastest-growing region and Columbus remains the nation's 15th-largest city, with the population growing nearly 3 percent from April 2000 to July 2006."
I looked for the source of all this info but that site has not been updated. I looked for a chart that had more than the top ten cities... USA Today... that's the ticket. USA Today has a chart of the top 125 Population Centers.
Dream...
Columbus moving up to 14 nationally was all a dream Columbus is still #15... and probably destined to never climb the list with the increasess in Western and Southern US markets....and people moving out of cities to more suburban and even rural areas but we can dream.
Images used in this entry: LP Record from Wikipedia. "Photo taken with a Canon PowerShot A300® 3.2mp 5mm by Felipe Micaroni Lalli (micaroni@gmail.com). License written on a napkin. "I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license "
The graph has nothing to do with population, I just needed a chart. That is an old Alexa traffic chart for ActiveRain.com!! Don't strain your eyes trying to read it.
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