The places where Americans are dying faster than they’re being born

In over 1,200 American counties, people are dying faster than they're being born.

These numbers, recently released by the Census, show that in 2016 deaths outpaced births in a variety of regions all over the country.

Places like Appalachia, where the opioid crisis has been particularly severe. Or in the northernmost reaches of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, where new industries have struggled to take the place of old ones that have died out. Or along Washington state's Olympic peninsula, a region more known for its national parks than its industry.
In the map above and the ones that follow, I've reduced the coloration to a simple binary scale: red for losing population, blue for gaining it. This allows the regions gaining and losing population to stand out better than they would if I tried to represent the magnitude of gains and losses with a patchwork of different shades of red and blue.

It's not particularly surprising that deaths outpace births in certain regions. The U.S. population is growing older, and younger Americans are having fewer babies. Those trends will inevitably converge in some parts of the country, or among certain demographic groups. White Americans, for instance, have been dying faster than they're being born for a number of years now.

But birth and death represent only part of the picture on population change. Migration — both within the country, and from outside it — is the other major factor. The map below shows net migration for America's counties.

Americans are voting with their feet and moving out of a large swath of counties in the Great Lakes region. Nearly every county in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and New York lost population from migration in 2016, as did every single county in the state of Connecticut.

This follows a long-standing trend of migration out of colder climates and to places like the Sun Belt. But even in Southern states, the migration picture is mixed. An arc of red running from Mississippi up through the Carolinas shows net losses to migration in the counties of the black belt.

People are also moving out of the central plains region, from the Dakotas down through west Texas.

Combine the two maps above and you get the one below: the total net population gain or loss in American counties in 2016.

Population gainers include the Western half of the country, the entire Florida peninsula, the I-95 corridor from D.C. to New York, and the New England coast. On the other hand, places like the black belt, the Rust Belt, the extreme upper Midwest and much of the central plains lost population.

As Jed Kolko noted at FiveThirtyEight last week, overall the population shifts of 2016 marked a return to trends that had been common before the Great Recession: a movement of people out of cities and rural areas and into the country's suburbs, particularly in warmer regions.
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