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A big misunderstanding when discussing Rust Belt population decline is to only focus on the loss of adults. You know the trope "all the jobs left, so the people left!" If this were true, we would see it in the data. Its not. A large portion of the decline is less children.
If it was simply mass exodus of working people, you would see a uniform collapse of both people and adults from the cities. We didn't see that. As the above chart indicates, the loss of children was far larger than the overall drop in population.
Families are simply smaller now. The decline in household size alone accounts for 82% of all population decline in South Bend's history. In fact, when South Bend was losing its most people, the number of households was still going up!
Now why did household sizes crater? Well that's a huge national phenomena, but it was worse in Rust Belt cities because it became the norm for when you *did* have children, you were supposed to leave the central city for the suburbs. SB suburbs have larger households on average.
There is also the caveat that this battle against household size decline was something American cities fought the entirety of their existence. It was only in the mid-20th century where cities could not add enough households to counterbalance the shrinking family sizes.
Household size seems to have stabilized - and even slightly risen - over the past two decades. This will be interesting on a city level. Now, if you are seeing cities losing lots of people, it is most likely from population flight, not just households getting smaller.
Read more: https://westsb.com/features/morepeople-two
As always, Jason is a great resource on this: https://twitter.com/JasonSzegedi/status/1344627976940433409?s=20
