Few city planning concepts are as sacrosanct as the idea that growth is good and decline is bad.
For cities and counties, population growth is universally seen as a metric that defines success. Even stable population trends can be cast as stagnation to be avoided at all costs.
The Pittsburgh region illustrates the problem with that thinking. Between 2020 and 2025 the city of Pittsburgh added more than 4,500 residents – the highest numerical gain of any municipality in Pennsylvania, and its first sustained growth in roughly 70 years.
That’s a success story, if you keep your focus narrowed on Pittsburgh.
But that optimistic view falls apart if you zoom out to the eight-county metro area: The region lost nearly 35,000 residents over the same period. Growth concentrated in a few communities is complemented by declines elsewhere.
The painful demographic reality is that for an ever-growing number of places in the United States, population growth is slowing. Must that mean the region’s communities are failing to compete for residents and businesses?
I’m an economist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the new book “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation.” My research focuses on how cities adapt – or fail to – when population and economic growth no longer follow the patterns they once did.
When steel towns shrink
Two decades ago the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, Jay Williams, garnered national attention by pushing policies that accepted the city’s population would never return to its former peak. He made that shift a quarter-century after Black Monday, when over 5,000 steelworkers were laid off on Sept. 19, 1977.
At the turn of the century, Youngstown was still experiencing ongoing deindustrialization and depopulation. Williams argued that facing that reality honestly was the only way to build a new future, a concept sometimes called managed decline.
AP Photo/Tony Dejak
Youngstown was simply ahead of a large group of Rust Belt communities that would experience chronic population declines over the next 25 years. Communities such as Braddock, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Carnegie built his first steel plant in the 1870s, went from a peak of more than 20,000 residents in the 1920s to less than 2,000 today. Despite such evidence that past population peaks are likely never to return for certain communities, the idea of a city planning for anything other than growth is almost unthinkable in public discourse.
Yet, there is no clear connection between growth and community prosperity.
Many places across the U.S. and the world sustain quality of life and attract new investment while experiencing little or no population growth. Burlington, Vermont, is slow-growing yet consistently ranks high for livability and attracts significant investment relative to its size. Globally, Zurich and Vienna are also slow-growing but perennially top quality-of-life and investment rankings.
It may even be that planning for growth that is unlikely to happen works against the goals of building a successful community.
Planning for the present
These ideas are not new. More than two decades ago, economist Paul Gottlieb articulated the case for “Growth Without Growth,” arguing that population growth is not a useful measure of community success. What was once a distant warning has become a present reality for a growing number of communities.
New census data estimates over 41% of the nation’s 3,144 counties experienced outright population declines between 2020 and 2025. Of the 485 municipalities across the Pittsburgh metro region, 71% lost residents over the same period. These losses were concentrated in the older industrial towns of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio river valleys, where natural population decline, limited housing investment and decades of emigration continue to occur.
Meanwhile, what growth exists is clustered along the I-79 corridor in Butler and Washington counties, a geographic pattern that reflects suburban expansion more than regional resurgence.
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Communities can and, I believe, must adapt.
In his recent book, “Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth,” urbanist Alan Mallach examines the challenges facing places that can no longer count on growth. Planning and economic development will mean something different in that world.
For many communities, minimal growth or even modest decline will be the baseline. Mallach advocates for a shift in thinking about how local economies connect to the broader forces around them. He argues that declining population can also be an opportunity to green the urban environment and address housing shortages.
Global problem, local solutions
Managed decline is the honest recognition that a community’s best future may look different from its past. It shows that planning around realistic economic and population trends is the most sustainable path forward.
The United States is not alone in facing this reality. Germany, facing the rapid depopulation of its eastern states after reunification in 1990, became perhaps the world’s most deliberate laboratory for managed decline policy. Through the national
Stadtumbau Ost program, launched in 2002, the federal government funded the systematic demolition of surplus housing and the conversion of vacated urban land into parks and green infrastructure, explicitly reshaping cities around actual population rather than projected future growth.
Despite clear demographic trends, it remains unheard of for most local U.S. leaders to advocate for policies that plan for managed decline. Any political leader who did would likely face backlash. But the public needs an honest picture of what future growth and decline will look like and how different it may be from the past. In many communities or regions, growth will be possible only at the expense of greater decline elsewhere. Communities that face these trends will need to work together rather than compete.
None of this is to argue that Pittsburgh and other communities should not work to improve the quality of life for their residents, which, if successful, can generate population gains in the future. But for an ever-larger number of regions, and especially for the bulk of communities across southwestern Pennsylvania, those potential population gains will be ever more constrained and harder to sustain.
