Suburban sprawl is out

The Census Bureau recently released new municipal population estimates, and the data confirm that a transformation is indeed happening in the state.

A number of our urban and built-out municipalities have experienced growth since the recession. Built-out places – which also tend to be the more compact, walkable, and transit-accessible places – have reversed decades of stagnation and sometimes outright population loss, and are now the primary drivers of growth in the post-recession era.

Here's what we learned by crunching the numbers:

Population growth in our eight urban centers outpaced statewide growth in recent years.

Taken as a group, the cities of Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Trenton, Camden, New Brunswick, and Atlantic City – the eight urban centers designated by the State Development and Redevelopment – lost population every decade from 1950 through 1990, and then made incremental gains between 1990 and 2008.
But from 2008 to 2016, this group contributed a full 15.4 percent of statewide population growth, a bigger percentage than their proportion of the state population (they made up 12.0 percent of total statewide population in 2016).

But not all of our urban centers are participating in the revival.

Trenton, Camden, and Atlantic City all have fewer people in 2016 than they had in 2008, and all three have posted small population losses in each of the last two years. This means that the remaining five urban centers, led by a 9 percent growth rate in Jersey City, not only accounted for all the growth mentioned previously, but also made up for the minor losses in these three cities.

Read more at NJ.com