The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area is changing. It’s hollowing out – losing population in the center and growing at the edges.

According to new population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, 11 of the 20 cities in the metro area with at least 10,000 residents lost people from 2021 to 2022. That includes some of the more affluent cities closest to Birmingham, suburbs like Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, Hoover and Homewood.

RELATED: These are the fastest growing cities in Alabama in 2022

[Can’t see the map? Click here.]

Other cities near the core of the metro – cities like Irondale, Bessemer, Center Point and Gardendale – also shrank.

The only areas seeing growth were farther out from the center of the metro — fast-growing suburban cities like Calera and Chelsea in Shelby County and Pell City in St. Clair County.

And it’s not just that many of these Birmingham-area cities are losing people – it’s that they’re losing them fast.

Seven of Alabama’s 10 fastest-shrinking cities with at least 10,000 residents from 2021 to 2022 are in the core part of the Birmingham metro area, including some of those wealthy suburbs like Vestavia Hills (-1.3%) and Mountain Brook (-1.3%).

[Can’t see the list? Click here.]

For many of these cities, the population decline is a new phenomenon. Homewood gained nearly 1,700 people between the 2020 census and July of 2021, for example. And Hoover has been growing at a steady pace for decades, until this year. It’s unclear whether this trend will continue, or if 2022 will just be a blip on the radar for Alabama’s sixth-largest city.

Birmingham-Hoover

Looking just at the Birmingham-Hoover metro areas total population change from 2021 to 2022, you wouldn’t think much had changed. The metro as a whole – home to more than 1.1 million people, by far the largest in Alabama – essentially stayed flat in terms of population last year, losing just 185 people.

But within the metro itself, there was a lot of shifting. And the issue gets more apparent when you zoom out, and include many of the much smaller cities.

There are 77 total municipalities in the metro, many of them tiny hamlets with 1,000 or fewer people.

[Can’t see the map? Click here.]

Looking at the map, you can see that nearly all of the cities south of the metro’s core – those in Shelby County – grew. A similar but less drastic trend occurred in the northeastern part of the metro, in St. Clair and, to some degree, Blount counties.

RELATED: Alabama’s largest city gained 9 new people per day in 2022

It’s not clear based on this data exactly what’s driving the population loss at the core of the metro area. But looking at county-level data released earlier this year gives a bit of context. Jefferson County, which is home to most of the cities in the metro that lost population, shrank significantly in 2022, and it lost population in a number of ways.

Jefferson County saw net losses in population due to both migration and natural change – meaning more people moved out than moved in, and more people died than were born between 2021 and 2022.

The idea of Alabama seeing more deaths than births is a new one, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, that had never happened in the recorded history of the state. Alabama has managed to grow in population despite that over the past few years, thanks to an increase in new arrivals, mostly from other states. Now that the pandemic has largely subsided, many of these population trends will likely shift in the coming years.

Do you have an idea for a data story about Alabama? Or questions about Alabama that data may be able to answer? Email Ramsey Archibald at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @RamseyArchibald. Read more Alabama data stories here.