In St. Louis Population Decline No Longer Good or Bad, “It just is.”

In the City of St. Louis, we're apparently no longer allowed to say that further population decline is bad news. "It just is," Jeff Rainford, chief of staff for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay told the Post-Dispatch. His conclusion was prefaced by saying that the continued exodus "is not good news or bad news". The latest Census estimates a city of 318,069, down from 319,294 counted in 2010. Clearly the city no longer wants to own its decline, but more than just being quotable, the latest comments may show a city in less of a knee-jerk stance regarding notoriously inaccurate population estimates. Rainford says his quote was meant to address the estimated decline not being statistically significant. We won't have another official count until 2020, but one computer program estimates a bigger loss, 6,000 since 2010.

Smartly, the city has decided to no longer challenge those estimates. Fighting hard through the 2000s to claim the city was growing, Census estimates were routinely challenged, and raised. The city desperately wanted to believe it was growing for the first time in half a century. They hoped the 348,189 count in 2000 represented a low water mark for the city that once reached more than 850,000 residents. That hope evaporated when the 2010 number revealed not growth, but another 29,000 people choosing to leave.