Metro Area Population Continues Upward Trend
By D'Vera Cohn

reprinted from the Washington Post

The Washington area added 75,000 new residents last year, according to new census population estimates released today. One in four lives in Loudoun County, which grabbed a growing share of new arrivals and is one of the nation's fastest growing jurisdictions.

The region that extends from the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay to Northern Virginia horse country now numbers 5.9 million people, according to the new figures. It is the fastest growing metro area outside the Sunbelt.

The new census figures showed Fairfax County, the biggest local jurisdiction, with slightly more than a million people, a level that county demographers believe was reached in 2002.

"D.C. ranks in the upper third of major metro growth, well ahead of its East Coast and Midwest counterparts and just behind the high-flying metros located in Florida, Texas and the fast-growing Southeast and Mountain West," said Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey, who analyzed census figures for the nation's 43 largest metro areas. All have populations over 1.5 million.

Frey said the Washington region is growing because of a unique combination of factors: It is an attractive destination for new foreign-born arrivals, but native-born residents are not leaving, as thousands are in other immigrant-rich areas such as New York and Los Angeles.

Behind the region's numbers is a story of two different patterns of growth. Older, closer-in counties are expanding because of new immigrants and births. Newer exurban areas are growing mainly because of new residents coming from other U.S. communities, including some closer-in suburbs in this area.

The ring of counties the farthest from the District accounted for most population growth during the period covered by the new estimates, from mid-2003 to mid-2004. Loudoun alone added more than 18,000 new residents, and ranked third among counties nationwide in its rate of growth.

From 2000-2004, it grew 41 percent, a bigger increase than any other county in the country. During that same period, Stafford and Spotsylvania counties also were among the 25 fastest-growing jurisdictions, according to the census figures.

Nationally, according to the Census Bureau, Flagler County in Florida ranked first last year for its 10.1 percent one-year population increase. Kendall County, outside Chicago, ranked second, at 8.3 percent, and Loudoun grew 8.1 percent.

Relatively few new immigrants moved to local exurban counties, according to the census figures -- less than a hundred arrived last year in the southern Maryland communities of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties, for example.

But thousands of new foreign-born residents are coming to the region's big suburbs that wrap around the Capital Beltway. More than 25,000 settled in Fairfax, Montgomery and Prince George's counties last year, the census numbers show. Those jurisdictions also had more than 40,000 new births last year, many of them to immigrant parents.

The census figures showed that 83 of the 100 fastest-growing communities last year were in the South and West, continuing a pattern that has prevailed for decades. None were in the Northeast.

Census Bureau demographer Katherine Condon said the national trend also is for exurban areas -- counties located in metro areas but far from urban downtowns -- to expand the most rapidly. Only seven counties in the fastest-growing 100 are not located in large or small metropolitan areas, she said.

The census estimates indicate that Arlington County's population declined slightly, and Alexandria's held steady. Estimates by Virginia state demographers for those two communities are somewhat higher. A previously released estimate said the District declined by about 9,000 people.