Metro Chicago shrinks again

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

For the third year in a row, the population of metropolitan Chicago has dropped, and though the number of people is small, the trend is causing angst among local officials.

According to new estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, total population of the tristate Chicago area slipped about 13,000—a bit over a tenth of a percentage point—to 9,533,044 in the year ended June 30. Chicago was the only metro among the nation's top 10 to shrink, although the growth in peer metros New York and Los Angeles was minimal, about 46,000 and 25,000, respectively.

The actual decline was concentrated in Cook County, which lost about 20,000 residents. But according to demographers at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Cook is just returning to the slow decline that pretty much halted during the subprime mortgage recession, in which migration nationally slowed to a crawl.

The real thing that's changed is that outer counties such as Will and McHenry aren't growing nearly as fast as they did in prior decades, combined with a sharp reduction in immigration to the Chicago area, according to Elizabeth Schuh, principal policy analyst at CMAP, which represents the seven Illinois counties in the region but not those in northwest Indiana or southeast Wisconsin. "Almost all of the counties except Kendall are losing," says Schuh, who's had a few days to study the data.

The struggles of Blue America. Just a reminder, this is a vibrant growing area according to Hillary Clinton because she won this area...