8638: Black Population Shrinkage.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Black population shrinking in major cities

By Haya El Nasser

The black population is declining in a growing number of major cities, ¬ more evidence that the settlement pattern of African Americans is changing as they disperse to suburbia and warmer parts of the nation.

2010 Census data released so far this year show that 20 of the 25 cities that have at least 250,000 people and a 20 percent black population either lost more blacks or gained fewer in the past decade than during the 1990s.

The declines happened in some traditional black strongholds: Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland and St. Louis.

Chicago lost more than 200,000 residents, and more than 180,000 of them were African American. In the metropolitan area, the black population fell 3.5 percent to 1.6 million, pushing it 66,000 below metro Atlanta’s.

In America’s big cities, the loss is fueled by three trends:

• Blacks — many in the middle or upper-middle class — leaving cities for suburbs.

• Blacks leaving Northern cities for thriving centers in the South.

• The aging of the African-American population, whose growth rate has dropped from more than 16 percent in the 1990s to about 10 percent since 2000.

“Sadly for Chicago, I think in large part it’s the weather,” says Chinwe Onyeagoro, CEO of O-H Community Partners, a Chicago-based economic development consulting firm.

Sunny skies and warm temperatures are luring not only retirees but also young professionals who may have friends or relatives in the Sun Belt — Atlanta and Houston in particular, she says.

Suburbs anywhere are a huge draw.

“Typically, middle-class African-American families make the same kind of choices that white families have made for some time,” Onyeagoro says. “As soon as kids are school age, they move to the suburbs.”

Atlanta’s loss of blacks tripled since 2000 to almost 30,000. The percentage of blacks in the city shrank to 53 percent from 61 percent. But in Atlanta’s vast metropolitan area, the black population soared 40 percent to 1.7 million, a clear indication that many spread out to suburban counties.

The drop also can be partially attributed to a declining black fertility rate and the aging of the black population, says John Logan, director of US 2010 Project at Brown University, which studies trends in American society. “We’re starting to see the graying not only of the white population but of the black population,” he says.

Gannett News Service