By Ramsey Archibald | rarchibald@al.com
The Magic City keeps losing people.
Birmingham city lost more than 1 percent of its population between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, according to new estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That loss was enough to push Birmingham down the list of Alabama’s largest cities for the second time in two years.
Birmingham’s population fell below 200,000 for the first time in 100 years, and it now stands at number three statewide, behind Huntsville and now Montgomery. Montgomery also fell below 200,000, but didn’t shrink as fast as Birmingham did in the latest federal estimates.
Long the most populous city in Alabama, Birmingham has steadily lost population for decades. When results from the 2020 Census came out, it became official – Birmingham was no longer the largest city in the state. It was passed by booming Huntsville, which has exploded in population over the last decade.
Back in 2010, Huntsville was the fourth largest city in the state, with just 180,000 residents. Since then, Huntsville has added nearly 37,000 people, or an increase of about 20 percent in 11 years. That’s nearly as many people as live in the Birmingham-area suburb of Vestavia Hills.
And Huntsville continued to grow in the latest counts, expanding despite the pandemic. It added nearly 2,000 people from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021, for a growth of nearly 1 percent in just a year.
Meanwhile, Birmingham – and the rest of Alabama’s large cities – are headed in the opposite direction.
Birmingham lost more than 2,500 people over the last year – the largest total population loss of any city in Alabama over that time. It was enough to push the city’s population below 200,000, down to 197,575. That’s the lowest its population has been since the 1920 Census, when the bureau counted 178,806 residents within the Birmingham city limits.
When the 2010 Census came out, Birmingham’s population was over 212,000, meaning the city has lost nearly 15,000 people in 11 years, a 7 percent decline.
Montgomery is also shrinking. The 2020 Census showed Birmingham and Montgomery’s populations were nearly identical, with Birmingham having just 196 more people. Over the next year, Birmingham lost more people than Montgomery, allowing the state’s capital city to back into second place.
Huntsville is now the only Alabama city with more than 200,000 residents. And no Alabama city is among the 100 largest in the United States right now, as Huntsville sits at 106th in the latest estimates.
Alabama’s fourth largest city, Mobile, also continues to lose population. It’s lost more than 10,000 people since 2010, a 5 percent decline. That includes a loss of 1,500 people from 2020 to 2021, the second largest decline of any city behind only Birmingham.
These population estimates are for individual cities only. The Birmingham-Hoover metro area is still by far the largest metro area in Alabama, with more than 1.1 million people, compared to Huntsville’s 500,000.
The population change during this period was heavily affected by deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 was the first year in Alabama’s recorded history that the state saw more deaths than births – a trend that continued through to 2021.
Finally, some may see all the new apartments coming up in downtown and wonder how the city could possibly be losing people so quickly. Birmingham is a large city, geographically, and was once home to more than 340,000 people. But Birmingham neighborhoods shrunk between 2010 and 2020.
