As exurban cities near booming metro areas explode in growth, hundreds of U.S. communities are losing residents at a pace that signals deep structural decline.
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Why it matters: The shrinking cities are a crisis in plain sight.
- They concentrate poverty and tend to have aging infrastructure and limited job growth.
- They struggle to attract doctors and teachers and have few of the amenities drawing younger Americans to boomtowns like Celina, Texas or Apex, N.C.
Zoom in: An Axios analysis of census estimates found more than 600 incorporated places of 20,000 or more lost population between April 2020 and July 2025.
- Many of the fastest-declining cities are majority-Black communities in the Deep South, working-class Mexican American and Native American cities in the Southwest or legacy industrial towns in the Midwest.
By the numbers: Big Spring, Texas, lost 15.3% of its population since 2020 — the steepest percentage drop of any U.S. city of 20,000 or more, per the Axios review of Census estimates.
- Greenville, Miss., was second, falling 10.6%, dropping from 29,690 to 26,530.
- Gallup, N.M. — the largest city on the Navajo Nation's edge and a hub for Indigenous commerce along Route 66 — lost 8.8% of its residents.
- The city's daily newspaper, The Gallup Independent, closed in January after what publisher Bob Zollinger described as the area's economic "collapse."
Zoom in: Big Spring's decline came after two privately operated federal detention centers closed in 2021, costing the area several hundred jobs.
- Big Spring's fortunes in the Permian Basin also have long been tied to the volatility of the West Texas oil economy.
- Mississippi alone has three cities in the top 10 fastest-declining list: Greenville, Vicksburg, and Jackson.
- All three are majority-Black cities facing compounding crises: chronic underinvestment, high poverty rates, deteriorating infrastructure and outmigration of younger residents to metro areas.
Zoom out: The U.S. has added millions of housing units since 2020, but that construction is almost entirely happening in the booming metros in the South and Mountain West, not in the communities shrinking fastest.
Yes, but: Population loss isn't always a death spiral.
- St. Louis, for example, has been shrinking for 70 years and retains a functioning civic economy, major universities, and a regional healthcare system.
- And some of the fastest-declining cities by percentage are starting from small enough bases that raw numbers remain manageable.
Between the lines: The racial geography of decline is impossible to ignore. The majority of the top 10 fastest-shrinking cities — in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana — are majority-Black communities in the South.
- These are cities that never fully recovered from decades of disinvestment, and the current growth era is not reaching them.
- Meanwhile, federal housing and infrastructure dollars are increasingly flowing toward the fast-growing exurbs that need new roads, schools, and utilities.
- That leaves shrinking cities competing for fewer resources with diminishing political representation as their congressional clout shrinks with their populations.
Caveat: It's also worth noting that Twentynine Palms, Calif. — with a steep decliner of -7.6% — is home to a U.S. Marine Corps base, so its losses may reflect military deployment cycles as much as economic flight.
The bottom line: The Census data presents two Americas in sharp relief.
- One is building, expanding, and filling in the outer rings of Sun Belt metros at a pace unseen in decades.
- The other is contracting — losing people, tax base, and political power in a slow bleed that rarely makes national headlines.